Page 19 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

1.4 Tools and actions in LCT 13
From a market perspective, along supply chains and towards consumers, the demand for
information concerning environmental footprint increases, and it guides efforts in
ecoinnovation, ecomanagement, and ecolabeling. Companies and consumers undoubtedly
prefer synthetic and immediate evaluation and communication tools, although in taking
CF or WF as the one and only yardstick, one has to face life-threatening trade-offs
(Finkbeiner, 2009).
Future perspectives to develop partial LCAs do exist; these life cycle tools can deepen the
analysis of single environmental problems, enriching environmental models that support life
cycle impact assessment with ad hoc quantification and regionalization (Bulle et al., 2019).

1.4.4 Ecolabeling
LCA, originally developed to be used as a decision support tool for environmental man-
agement, now has several related applications such as external communication through en-
vironmental labels and declarations. As ISO classified, three typologies of environmental
labels exist: type I, II, and III; for each of them we can refer to ad hoc standards, for measuring
and communicating the environmental performance of products: ISO 14024 (ISO, 2018a), ISO
14021 (ISO, 2016), and ISO 14025 (ISO, 2006a), respectively.
In recent years, the market demand for environmental product declarations, such as type
III environmental labels, has increased, as well as the number of program operators (Toniolo
et al., 2019a). At the same time, in the European market, the European Commission launched
the Product Environmental Footprint (EC, 2013), a multicriteria method to calculate the en-
vironmental profile of products with a life cycle perspective; it is an applicable tool
supporting external communication or public procurement tender requirements.
This growing number of different environmental product declaration schemes with differ-
ent requirements causes confusion in the market and disorientation in purchasing decisions;
consequently, an effort to make labels more reproducible, comparable, and verifiable, will be
much appreciated by the market (Del Borghi et al., 2019).

1.4.5 Life cycle initiative
Hosted by the UN, thanks to the common commitments of the United Nations Environ-
mental Protection and Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry, the Life Cycle
Initiative (LCI) is the interface between users and experts of life cycle approaches (LCI,
2017). LCI provides a global forum to ensure a science-based and consensus-building process
to support decisions towards the shared vision of sustainability as a public good. It delivers
authoritative opinion on sound tools and approaches by engaging multi-stakeholder partner-
ship, including governments, private and public organizations, scientists, scholars, and civil
society.
The LCI is a public-private, multistakeholder partnership enabling the global use of cred-
ible life cycle knowledge by private and public decision makers. It facilitates the application of
principles and tools of LCT in local governments and markets. The mission of LCI has two