Page 53 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

Life Cycle Assessment: Principles, Practice and Prospects
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LCA, where the process of the assessment is revealed and emphasised, the educative value of
the LCA may be far greater (e.g. see Norris 2005).

4.8 Conclusions
The successful application of LCA depends on the appropriate question being asked, and a wide
understanding of the context and meaning of the outcome. Although it is often applied to
addressing ‘big’ questions, it is important that the results are not seen as fundamental ‘answers’.
First, an LCA is a snapshot of a product system at a point in time under specified assumptions. It
generally has little to say about the adaptability of the system, its limits, risks or potential. Also,
new innovative technologies often look inefficient in the early design stage and can fare poorly in
LCA terms even if they are potentially of great benefit to the environment. More importantly, the
results should never be taken literally or in isolation from the broader dynamics and potentials of
the product system and human system in which the things being assessed occur. The knowledge
‘frames’ or paradigms of the different stakeholders involved are much more influential in sus-
tainability decisions than any supply chain identified by LCA (Tukker 2000).
Products are embedded in strong cultural, economic, legal and political structures and
systems, which variously facilitate or impede proposed environmental solutions (Fisher 2006).
The practicality of proposed solutions depends on these structures, systems and the interrela-
tions between them. Consider, for example, the political objections to challenging the role of
plastics in the economy, as opposed simply to proposing biopolymers. Various organisations
exist purely to promote plastic products. At the Australian LCA Society (ALCAS) conference
in 2006, the American Plastics Council, which actively uses and promotes LCA, stated that its
mission is to ‘make plastics a preferred material, helping to defend and expand market oppor-
tunities for its businesses’ (Lew 2006). Approaches that take account of existing ‘frames’ and
structures, particularly those approaches that allow participation of stakeholders and negotia-
tion, provide more potential for a new consensus and a shared vision – and even new trans-
formative pathways for change.
Finally, there is a tension between LCA not in itself providing comprehensive, objective or
‘big’ answers, yet having a role in producing unique, profound, useful information, which can
lead to fundamental shifts in practice. While LCA results do not themselves provide solutions
to sustainability questions, they do increase the knowledge base, which can reveal pathways to
sustainable solutions. Furthermore, an LCA conducted with integrity and based on systematic
calculations produces results that are scientifically robust and reliable.
So, what does this tension say about how the development of LCA may proceed? One
option is to constrain its application. LCA practitioners could ‘acknowledge that they can’t
come up with overall answers and just produce a tool that generates limited data’ (Tukker
2000). This approach suggests a new repression of LCA. There is, however, an alternative that
is ‘braver’ (Goedkoop and Alvarado 2006) and engages both with the urgency of sustainabil-
ity and the great potential of LCA to help achieve it. When Dutch designers and LCA practi-
tioners came together in the early 1990s to develop an eco-indicator, the designers insisted
that a single indicator was necessary while the LCA practitioners insisted that it was impos-
sible, given the complexity of the data. After six months of meetings, they realised they were
both right, so they went ahead and developed an indicator anyway (M. Goedkoop, pers.
comm.). This approach acknowledges that LCA cannot deliver objective answers, let alone
the ‘right’ answers, but it can generate effective answers, and we have a responsibility to come
up with the best answers possible considering that the world’s environmental problems
require them. Taking this view, it would be a mistake to constrict the use of LCA. Instead, the
methods and tools should continue to be explored and evolved.

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