Michael Z. Hauschild - Life Cycle Assessment

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It is an old observation that What gets measured gets managed, and that what is not measured or measurable runs the risk of being neglected. It is therefore important that we have tools for assessing the sustainability of our choices when we develop the technologies and systems that shall help us determine and meet the needs of the present generations in a way that does not compromise the ability of our descendants to meet their needs in the future.

As you will learn from this book, we must take a life cycle perspective when we want to assess the sustainability of the solutions that lie in front of us. You will be presented with many examples of problem shifting where solutions that improve or solve a targeted problem unintentionally create other problems of environmental, economic or social nature somewhere else in the systems of processes and stakeholders affected by our choice. If we do not consider the totality of these systems in our analysis, we will fail to notice these unwanted consequences of our decision and we will not be able to take them into consideration. We also have to consider a broad range of potential impacts in our assessment, in fact all those is that the system can contribute to and that we consider relevant in the context of our decision-situation.

Life Cycle Assessment, LCA, offers this totalityit analyses the whole life cycle of the system or product that is the object of the study and it covers a broad range of impacts for which it attempts to perform a quantitative assessment. The focus of LCA has mainly been on the environmental impacts although both social and economic impacts can be included as well. It is an important assessment tool as demonstrated by the central role that it has been given in the environmental regulation in many parts of the world and certified by its ISO standardization and the strong increase in its use over the last decades by companies from all trades and all over the world.

Engineers and scientists who develop decision support, or make decisions where sustainability is a concern, should understand the need to view the solutions in a life cycle perspective and to consider possible trade-offs between environmental impacts and between the three sustainability dimensions. Designers and engineers who design and develop products and technical systems should be able to critically read and evaluate life cycle assessment information about the alternatives that they are considering, and the environmental sustainability specialists among them should also be able to perform the LCA studies.

Focus is on environmental impacts but life cycle sustainability assessment is considered through introductory chapters on social LCA and on life cycle costing.

The structure of the book with separate and comprehensive parts on LCA methodology (theory), LCA cookbook (own practice) and LCA applications (practice of others) allows it to cater to the needs of this rather broad group of potential users.

A total of 68 authors contributed to the writing of this book (see short presentations of contributors at the end of each chapter). The core team consisted of researchers from the division for Quantitative Sustainability Assessment at the Department of Management Engineering at the Technical University of Denmark, where the three editors have or have had their employment (Ralph Rosenbaum now is an Industrial Chair for Environmental and Social Sustainability Assessment at the French National Research Institute of Science and Technology for Environment and Agriculture (Irstea) in Montpellier, France). Other contributions were solicited from leading experts within each field from the rest of the world, in particular for discussion of the different applications of LCA.