Once the sole preserve of the terminally academic, lifecycle assessment is poised to emerge as a key force for change in environmental practice in Australia.
The technique of lifecycle assessment (LCA) was hatched in the calm green waters of the mid-1970s when researchers first started to think about man’s most rapidly depleting reserves – fossil fuels – and how these might be affected by the materials and products we are all consuming.
Its methodologies and disciplines were initially tuned to assess embodied energy. LCA evolved in the late 1980s and early 1990s as more studies were commissioned and more impact categories were added – climate change, land use change, resource depletion, ozone depletion, photochemical smog, human and eco-toxicity, loss of ecological diversity… and the list continues to grow.
In Europe, a proliferation of initiatives to develop ecolabels was progressing, most prominently the Blue Angel (Germany) and Nordic Swan and the EC Flower ecolabels. Many Asian and American countries have followed this model more recently.
In academic circles, Holland, Switzerland, Germany and Sweden are establishing substantial databases of LCA infor- mation. The Swiss Ecoinvent database is the largest.
Where LCA has fallen short is in determining how to weight different environmental impact categories, how to allocate them to multiple products from the same basic manufacturing process and how to compare products from different sectors but with the same functional performance.
This has proved particularly problematic in the construc- tion sector where materials and products come from almost every industrial sector to be fabricated into the floors, walls, roofs, windows, floor and wall finishes, heating and cooling equipment, lighting and controls for buildings.
Read more: In Perspective – Life Cycles in the Real World, article with permission from WME magazine, by Nigel Howard