Life Cycle Assessment

Abstract

Born as a military accounting tool and adopted by corporate America to increase efficiency, life cycle assessment has matured into an indispensable method for environmentalists to quantify ecological impacts.

Chapter 4 presented how in the 1950s the US Military employed a life cycle approach to optimize resource allocation by applying scientific scrutiny to the budgeting process. In the 1960s, Coca-Cola was the first corporation to implement similar techniques to include the consideration of environmental impacts as part of their strategic financial decision-making. Nearly 30 years later, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) codified such techniques as life cycle assessment. The ISO published a concise definition of this complex and sprawling activity in the first formal global LCA standard in 1997.

Environmental LCA, which takes a life cycle view of a product or activity from gathering raw materials through end of life, is now a recognized formal scientific discipline and currently the purview of scientists, economists, and accountants. Specialized terms and methods, fundamental to the proper assessments carried out by these technical disciplines, continue to challenge LCA’s broad acceptance by the design community. Design professionals familiar with origins and fundamentals of LCA, however, can more thoroughly engage with these processes to actively shape a design’s ecological profile and provide additional value to their clients and the public. A working knowledge of the basics benefit the non-specialist. This chapter will focus on “goal and scope,” the first of the four primary LCA phases as an introduction to the three others that will be covered in later chapters.