Page 232 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

ACCOUNTING FOR ECOSYSTEM GOODS AND SERVICES 219

world as they can use less "free" ecosystem goods and services (World Business
Council for Sustainable Development, 2009). The question then becomes what
we can and should do to reverse these trends. Perhaps the most valuable thing
we can do is simply to introduce these concerns into our decision-making.
One area where we can easily address these concerns is to put these ecosystem
services into the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology.
In addition to the insights gained from LCA, we should also be aware of the
profound implications of the second law of thermodynamics on the capability of
man-made technology in meeting sustainability goals. This is because the second
law implies that in an open system, decreasing entropy in the system must result
in an even greater increase in entropy in the surroundings. This increase usu-
ally manifests itself as environmental impact since the surrounding environment
must dissipate the local increase in entropy (Huesemann, 2003). Since virtually
all technological activities aim to create order in the form of manufactured goods
and services, environmental impact is seemingly inevitable. This implies that no
single technology, product or process can be claimed to be truly sustainable. In
fact, it also implies that no individual technology by itself, that is available now
or will be developed in the future, can lead to sustainability. This poses a severe
dilemma for engineering research and technology development (Gutowski,
Sekulic, & Bakshi, 2009). With this awareness of the challenge of finding sustain-
able designs and processes, we can include ecosystem goods and services in our
decision making to make the best, most sustainable choices possible.

9.2 Life Cycle Assessment Background

LCA practitioners routinely use two methods to perform the assessment of
products and processes: process-based LCA and economic input-output LCA.
In process-based LCA, all of the inputs and outputs of a process are tallied up
to see all of the required resources and emissions over the entire life cycle of
a product. This allows for the complete environmental impact of a product to
be found (Scientific Applications International Corporation, 2006). However,
finding the values for all of the inputs to a process can be very difficult. If
an LCA is intended to be truly complete, then all of the inputs to the process
inputs must also be found and added in. As one goes further and further back
through the inputs to inputs, it can become impossible to ever complete an
LCA. To avoid this problem of completeness, an economic input-output (EIO)
model is added to the LCA process (Hendrickson, Lave, & Matthews, 2006).
Economic input-output (EIO) models use a country's entire economy as the
system that is assessed. It then looks at all the transactions between the differ-
ent industries, or sectors. Using network analysis and linear algebra, we can
find both the direct and indirect resource consumption and emissions for each
sector used in the life of our product. The direct consumption and emissions
are for the inputs to a process, while the indirect comes from the inputs to
the inputs, etc. The EIO model therefore results in a very complete picture of
resource use and emissions for any product or process in the country, e.g. the