Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a scientific method for measuring the environmental footprint of materials, products and services over their entire lifetime.

ID=173 :: post_name=whats-the-difference :: post_title=LCA, LCI, LCIA, LCC: What’s the Difference? :: post_status=publish :: post_type=page :: post_category=Array

LCA, LCI, LCIA, LCC: What’s the Difference?

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a multi-step procedure for calculating the lifetime environmental impact of a product or service. The complete process of LCA includes goal and scope definition, inventory analysis, impact assessment, and interpretation. The process is naturally iterative as the quality and completeness of information and its plausibility is constantly being tested.

LCI is the life cycle inventory, which is the data collection portion of LCA. LCI is the straight-forward accounting of everything involved in the “system” of interest. It consists of detailed tracking of all the flows in and out of the product system, including raw resources or materials, energy by type, water, and emissions to air, water and land by specific substance. This kind of analysis can be extremely complex and may involve dozens of individual unit processes in a supply chain (e.g., the extraction of raw resources, various primary and secondary production processes, transportation, etc.) as well as hundreds of tracked substances.

LCIA is life cycle impact assessment, the “what does it mean” step. In LCIA, the inventory is analyzed for environmental impact. For example, manufacturing a product may consume a known volume of natural gas (this data is part of the inventory); in the LCIA phase, the global warming impact from combustion of that fuel is calculated. There are various methods globally for categorizing and characterizing the life cycle impact of the flows to and from the environment, which can somewhat complicate the comparability of different LCA studies. Other variables in LCIA include the system boundary (how far upstream, downstream and sidestream does the analysis go), the functional unit (what is the volume/mass/purpose of the object being assessed), and specific LCIA methods such as allocation (how are impacts assigned to the product and by-products, on what basis). When comparing two LCA studies, these factors are critical to understanding if the comparison is apples-to-apples.

LCI and LCA should not be confused with life cycle costing. LCC is another life cycle approach (i.e, cradle to grave) but it looks at the direct monetary costs involved with a product or service and not environmental impact.