Page 53 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

34 LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT HANDBOOK

in detail and as there is no common agreement on how to interpret some
of the ISO requirements, diverging approaches have been developed with
respect to system boundaries and allocation methods [60,61], dynamic LCA
[62,63,64,65], spatially differentiated LCA [60,61], risk-based LCA [66,67,68,69],
environmental input-output based LCA (EIO-LCA) based and hybrid LCA
[70,71,72] that may have a tense relation with some of the basic principles of
the ISO standards. On top of this, life cycle costing (LCC; cf. [73]) - first used
in the 1960s by the US Department of Defense for the acquisition of high-
cost military equipment [74] - and social life cycle assessment (SLCA; cf. [75])
approaches have been proposed and/or developed that may have consistency
problems with environmental LCA in terms of system boundaries, time per-
spectives, calculation procedures etc. [76,77].
These different approaches have the life-cycle basis in common but they
differ in the methodological elaboration and in the question(s) they are address-
ing. We need to clarify exactly how the various approaches differ or overlap,
but, most importantly, we need to clarify the link between questions and
approaches: which approach is useful for which question. Despite new LCA
textbooks being published [78,79,80], there is a further need for structuring this
varying field of LCA approaches. We also need to take into account more types
of externalities (economic and social impacts) and more mechanisms (rebound,
behavior, price effects, dynamics) to meet the above-mentioned shortcomings
of existing LCA studies in the field of, for example, biofuels while meeting
specific user needs such as in simplified LCA.
The European Commission acknowledged this challenge and commissioned
the CALCAS (Co-ordination Action for innovation in Life Cycle Analysis for
Sustainability) project in 2006 to structure the varying field of LCA approaches
and to define research lines and programmes to further LCA where necessary.
The CALCAS project has been finished and results have been published [81].
One of its main results concerns the establishment of a framework for Life
Cycle Sustainability Analysis (LCSA) linking life cycle sustainability questions
to knowledge needed for addressing them, identifying available knowledge
and related models, knowledge gaps and defining research programmes to fill
these gaps.

2.2.3 Future LCA (2010-2020): Decade of Life Cycle Sustainability
Analysis

The LCSA framework is a framework for future LCA (see Figure 2.4). It broadens
the scope of current LCA from mainly environmental impacts only to covering
all three dimensions of sustainability (people, planet and prosperity). It also
broadens the scope from predominantly product-related questions (product
level) to questions related to sector (sector level) or even economy-wide levels
(economy level). In addition, it deepens current LCA to also include other than
just technological relations, e.g. physical relations (including limitations in
available resources and land), economic and behavioral relations, etc. In addi-
tion, as part of deepening, normative aspects such as discounting, weighting,