This report A Life Cycle Impact Assessment Method, by Jonas Bengtsson and Nigel Howard, was produced as one of the components of a three-year project jointly funded by the Building Products Innovation Council and AusIndustry (referred to as the BPIC/ICIP project). The aim is to establish a toolkit of resources that will permit comprehensive Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of building and construction materials and products, building elements and assemblies, and whole buildings in Australia.
The objective of this report is to propose a set of environmental impact categories and characterisation methods for a midpoint Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) method to allow for consistent level playing field comparison between LCA studies.
The approach taken comprised the following major steps:
- review of international best practice
- multi-criteria evaluation of available LCIA methods and approaches
- assessment of availability and relevance of impact assessment models for Australia
- identification of data sources for characterisation of impacts identified and recommended (normalisation and weighting of environmental impacts are reported separately).
This report is also available from Building Products Life Cycle Inventory.