Page 22 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

ENVIRONMENTAL LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT 3

environmental LCA in the public domain applications, and increasingly so in
the European Union (EU) as well. Environmental LCA first developed rela-
tively unobserved by the private sector, before having the name shortened to
simply "LCA" at the end of the Eighties. Both CBA and LCA have a life cycle
concept at their core. The major difference between them is that CBA speci-
fies activities in time and then uses a discounting method, in line with domi-
nant modes of economic analysis, which is similar to the Life Cycle Analysis
of cost. LCA, on the other hand, uses a timeless steady-state type of sys-
tem analysis, without discounting effects. CBA also quantifies environmen-
tal effects in economic terms and then discounts them. In modeling welfare
effects of climate policies, for example, the discounting mode is dominant.
That dynamic analysis seems superior to the static GWP (Global Warming
Potential) analysis used in LCA. How to quantify environmental effects in
an economic sense and how to discount effects spread across time remains
a core issue in CBA, open to further public and scientific debate. In LCA the
time frame discussion is hardly present. Looped processes are not, and can-
not, be specified in time. The only explicit treatment of time is found in the
consideration of the different environmental themes in GWP impacts, with
scores being limited to 20, 50 or 100 years, and in the toxic effects of heavy
metals and the like that are assumed to extend virtually to eternity. The time
frame discussion, then, might be part of Interpretation, which is problematic
in itself while also hardly any guidance is given in the ISO standards or in
any of the instructional guides that followed.
It would be interesting to have a discourse on overlapping issues and stra-
tegic choices in the domains of Cost-Benefit Analysis; Life Cycle Analysis of
costs; and environmental Life Cycle Assessment.

1.3 LCA Links to Environmental Policy

The conceptual jump from life cycle cost analysis to the first life cycle-based
waste and energy analysis, and then to the broader environmental LCA (how
we view LCA today) was made through a series of small steps. Documented
history starts with the famous Coca Cola study from 1969, see Hunt and
Franklin (1996), who were involved in LCA right from that start. The environ-
mental focus was on resource use and waste management, not yet the broad
environmental aspects that are usual in LCA now. The broad conceptual jump
to environmental LCA as contrasted with Life Cycle Analysis of cost was made
in the Eighties and formalized in the Nineties with the work of SETAC and the
standardization in the 14040 Series of ISO, see Klöpffer (2006). From the start
with the RAND Corporation in the end of the Fifties, the system to be analyzed
was clear. It should cover the supply chain, including research and develop-
ment, the use stage, and the processing of wastes from all stages, including
end-of-life of the product analyzed.
The link to public policy was made based on concepts first developed
in the Netherlands, in the Eighties at the Department of Environmental