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Life Cycle Assessment: Principles, Practice and Prospects
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‘thermal comfort’ as a function of clothes. In colder climates, the health benefits of warm
clothes could be taken into account to evaluate the reduction in human health damage provided
by giving warm clothes to poor and homeless people. In warmer climates, the role of fabric in
blocking exposure to UV light could be taken into account. In this case, clothes could be
compared to umbrellas or sun screens.
Getting to the heart of the reasons people purchase and use different products and services
can open up new opportunities for resolving the environmental problems associated with
them. It is also clear that context reveals possibilities for impact outcomes that would other-
wise be unexpected, and may lead to new options being contemplated. Whether or not these
new options are practical as well as possible, they tend to transcend those considered within
the original, narrower context. For example, the question of the technical efficiency of the spin
cycle on washing machines is of little relevance for clothes made from materials that do not
require to be washed with a vigorous spin cycle.

4.5 Challenging consumption
The downside of the focus on functionality is its potential to justify consumption. By under-
standing why we use products and services, whether we need to use them in the first place can
be obscured. This is related to LCA usually examining the relative performance of products or
services within a consumption bracket, and so rarely considers the overall scale of environ-
mental impact of those products and services. The effect of this focus can been seen in suppli-
ers’ and consumers’ responses to eco-labels and other ‘green’ labelling schemes, which are
usually based on LCAs. An eco-label sends a clear message – it is designed to send the message
– that purchasing the product so endorsed will be relatively good for the environment. Such a
message conspicuously fails to address the possibility (or even probability) that not buying any
product in that category may be even better for the environment. For example, a clothes dryer
with a relatively high star rating may compare favourably with other dryers in a whitegoods
store, but that same store will not sell, let alone promote, washing lines as an alternative to its
range of dryers.
Another constraint on the use of functionality is that, while common function is explicitly
defined as part of an LCA, once the functional unit itself is established, it is the one constant
against which everything is measured – and is thus rarely challenged. There have been some
attempts in LCA to address macro effects or scale of consumption, in particular increases in
consumption due to increases in efficiency and corresponding decreases in cost. This up-scale
of consumption, known as the rebound effect, offsets projected reductions in demand for
energy and material resources that occur as a result of improvements in technology efficiency
and green product development, but also as a result of LCAs and eco-labelling. Direct effects
occur when consumers choose to use more of the efficient product because it is cheaper. For
example, a more fuel-efficient car may be driven further or more often if the cost of fuel is
normally a limiting factor in car use. Furthermore, indirect effects occur when consumers use
the money they have saved on the more efficient product to buy more products. Market-wide
effects occur when the decreased cost of using a resource, for example electricity, opens up
economic opportunities for its use in new products. With regard to electricity, rebound effects
have been shown to reduce projected electricity savings by 10% to 40% depending on the
product (Gottron 2001; Herring 2006).
One response to such macro effects of consumption is the ‘E2 vector’ (Goedkoop et al.
1999). This is a European development in LCA that allows identification of both the absolute
environmental impact and the absolute economic cost of alternative options. The objective
here is to reveal the effects of economic growth and environmental load, and the links between

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