Page 10 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

4 1. Introduction. Life cycle thinking

purchases. Moreover, local governments and international institutions must be able to have
comprehensive and robust tools to guide companies and markets towards more sustainable
production and consumption behavior. All these measurement needs find an answer in the
most important operational tool of LCT: life cycle assessment (LCA). This analyses the
whole life cycle of the system or product that is the object of the study and it covers a broad
range of impacts for which it attempts to perform a quantitative assessment (ISO, 2006b).
LCA is an important assessment tool, as demonstrated by the central role it is given in en-
vironmental regulation in many parts of the world and the strong increase in its use by com-
panies all over the world (Hellweg and Mila ` i Canals, 2014). The focus of LCA has mainly
been on the environmental impacts although, as we will see in following sections, both so-
cial and economic impacts can be included as well, with a more extended perspective
known as sustainability assessment.
During the last 30 years, world leaders have explicitly recognized the need to change
unsustainable patterns of production and consumption, and life cycle approaches play a
key role. Demand for life cycle tools has increased, primarily thanks to numerous actions pro-
moted by international initiatives to support the inclusion of life cycle approaches in govern-
ments worldwide. At the same time, in a market perspective, both companies and customers
are giving increasing importance to impacts evaluation of products and services with a life
cycle perspective. Today, LCT is a fundamental theme that involves multiple sectors and
brings together the knowledge of many disciplines. Its current maturity is due to a progres-
sive evolution over the years, in terms of practices, methodologies, and policies. The next sec-
tion describes this evolution.

1.2 History of LCT

In the 1930s, economists begin discussing the unsustainability of welfare in an economy
that uses non-renewable resources (Hotelling, 1931). In the 1960s, attention towards adverse
environmental effects caused by environmental pollution increased and transparent and
science-based information begin to be demanded by environmental scientists (Carsol,
1962). The first life cycle oriented study might be the one presented in 1963 by Smith in
the World Energy Conference and it concerned the energy requirements for the production
of chemical intermediates and products (Boustead, 2003). In this decade, the first life cycle
studies in the United States and Northern Europe were conducted by some companies in
the packaging sector, in order to develop production systems with energy saving and emis-
sions reduction. These studies, carried out by large companies in an isolated manner, essen-
tially focused on the firm’s environmental management, aimed at improving internal
processes, without interest in communicating to stakeholders (Hunt et al., 1992). Early
methods, inspired by material flow accounting, were focused on inventorying energy and re-
source use, emissions, and solid waste. With more complex inventories, the focus was grad-
ually extended with a translation from physical flows accounting into environmental impact
evaluations, as contribution to climate change, eutrophication, and resource scarcity (Bjørn
et al., 2018b).