LCA, tool to stay? A search for critical factors influencing the reliability and use of life cycle assessment.

Abstract

The negative impact human economic activity has on the environment has proven to be significant. A product or service can have an impact on many categories such as toxicity, acidification, or CO2. To reduce this negative impact, and avoid it reaching critical levels, companies and governments must make informed decisions. To make these, Decision Support Tools (DST) have been developed. There are many kinds of decision support tools out there. An example of such a tool is a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). This approach is based on a hard-science perspective, providing quantified impacts of a product, accumulated in a set of impact categories. Although researchers often take utmost care to use precise data and derive the best conclusions, the method is subject to flaws. These flaws are widely discussed in literature. There is however a lack of studies that research the reliability and use of the LCA methodology beyond research. In this research, the author has looked at the reliability and use of the LCA methodology, both looking at the research and the implementation phase. The research question is therefore: “Which factors influence the reliability and use of the LCA methodology?” From the literature analysis and interviews, it became clear that there are still some major weaknesses within the methodology. The factors found to play a role in the reliability and use of LCAs are communication issues, comparability, uncertainty and assumptions, relative importance, data availability, objectivity, temporal and geographical limitations, time and quality tradeoff, the gap between academic and applied research, quality, impact category issues, market effects, cutoff issues, and allocation issues.