Page 99 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

CHAPTER

5

Development and applicability of life

cycle impact assessment methodologies

a a a
Sheng Yang , Kebo Ma , Zhiqiang Liu ,
b c
Jingzheng Ren , Yi Man
a
School of Energy Science and Engineering, Central South University, Changsha, People’s
b
Republic of China The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Department of Industrial and Systems
c
Engineering, Hong Kong SAR, China State Key Laboratory of Pulp and Paper Engineering, South
China University of Technology, Guangzhou, People’s Republic of China

5.1 Introduction

Environmental pollution has an increasing effect on our daily life; as a result, people focus
more and more on methods to assess environmental protection properties of industry pro-
cesses or industrial production. Over the years, life cycle assessment (LCA) has drawn a
lot of attention from many experts and scholars, by which the influence of industry processes
could be quantified clearly. Nowadays, the LCA method, along with other life cycle ideas, is
used to evaluate the environmental protection property of an industrial product, a craft pro-
cess, or an activity (I.E. Agency, 2018; Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change, 2014).
In the late 1960s, the life cycle assessment (LCA) concept emerged in the United States. In
1969, the Midwest Institute of the US tracked the processing procedure of bottles of Coca-
Cola, including glass bottles and plastic bottles, from resource to final disposal. The resource
and environmental profile analysis (REPA) method was used and laid the foundation for
LCA (Hunt et al., 1996). In the late 1980s, with the increasingly serious regional and global
environmental problems, global environmental awareness had been increasing gradually.
The public started to focus on the results of LCA. A number of works of LCA promoted
the rapid development of the LCA theory. In 1990, the first international seminar about
LCA was held by the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC), in which
the concept of life cycle assessment was brought forward for the first time. In 1993, Life Cycle

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Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment for Decision-Making Copyright # 2020 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-818355-7.00005-1