Life Cycle Assessment: Nice to Have or Essential for Environmental Footprints?

Abstract

The role of life cycle assessment (LCA) in footprinting has been a popular subject of discussion in the literature. The satisfactory performance of LCA on environmental impact assessment (EIA) could allow many footprint topics to be addressed under an LCA framework, in particular those that can be measured in relation to a functional unit. The carbon and abiotic resource footprints are presented as two examples of such LCA-based footprints, in which a variety of inventory flow associated with human disturbance are compiled and translated into impact scores on the basis of science-based characterization modeling. On the other hand, however, narrowing environmental footprints down to an LCA context is found to create blind spots, where exhaustive inventory data for compiling or consensus models for characterization of impact pathways are unavailable. Besides, there are certain important types of questions for which a footprint-type representation is desirable but for which a life cycle perspective is not or only partially appropriate. The organization environmental footprint (OEF) represents an obvious example of this. As a result, this chapter argues that footprints are not to be interpreted as a new name for the impact category indicators defined in LCA and, more importantly, that LCA does not substitute but complements footprint analysis. Further investigation into the relationship between environmental footprints and LCA would be critical to the development and refinement of both tools.