Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Overview
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a "cradle-to-grave" approach for assessing industrial systems. "Cradle-to-grave" begins with the gathering of raw materials from the earth to create the product and ends at the point when all materials are returned to the earth.1
The goal of life cycle assessment (LCA) is to:
- Quantify or otherwise characterize all the inputs and outputs over a product’s life span
- Specify the potential environmental impacts of these material flows
- Consider alternative approaches that change those impacts for the better.
Figure 1: Inputs and outputs over a product’s life cycle2
The Sustainable Facilities Tool allows you to compare materials with regard to environmental criteria and life cycle costs in Explore Sustainable Workspaces.
It is important to take into consideration the entire life cycle of materials, systems, and the whole building when making purchasing decisions. Only through LCA can the larger environmental image be quantified and compared over their life cycle to find alternatives that benefit humans and society alike.
For more information regarding LCA, continue reading one of the following topics:
Benefits of LCA
Benefits of LCA |
Identify the whole environmental impact picture |
Go beyond just the product “use” phase |
Quantify environmental effects such as overall energy consumption or air emissions |
Recognize inefficient or significant changes in the life cycle phases |
Compare alternatives “apples to apples” |
Reduce overall environmental impact and costs (as in an economic input-output LCA) |
Challenges to LCA
Challenges to LCA |
Defining LCA boundaries and scope |
Where do I want to draw the line? What attributes am I interested in comparing against one another? How far down the chain do I want to identify and quantify these material flows, and is that data even available? |
Data availability |
Is data available to quantify material inputs and outputs at all stages of my defined scope? Is this data from a direct source (e.x., manufacturer)? |
Quantifying environmental impacts |
How can these material flows be quantified into environmental categories (e.g., global warming)? |
Weighting impacts across stakeholders |
What environmental category are we most concerned about (e.x., acidification, global warming, energy use) and how does it compare to other environmental attributes? |