Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a well-known tool in the scientific community, useful to compare products and industrial processes. However, LCA is not commonly used in the industry, as it requires a large effort and... [ view full abstract ]
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a well-known tool in the scientific community, useful to compare products and industrial processes. However, LCA is not commonly used in the industry, as it requires a large effort and investment. There is a large variety of Life Cycle Impact assessment (LCIA) methods, some quite complex, each with different methodologies that lead to different results and eventually different decisions. In particular, the integration of pollutants into aggregate indicators has been treated in many different ways, both due to different approaches and because the impact of certain pollutants is not yet fully understood by the scientific community (dioxins and furans are a case in point that merited particular attention). Additionally, the range of local impacts is wide and not easy to adapt to LCA (which of necessity must be standardized over multiple products and processes). The aim of this work is to provide a solid comparison of indicators of pollution to air, water and soil, provided by a variety of LCIA methods: CML2001, Eco-indicator99, EDIP2003, Impact2002+, ReCiPe, TRACI and EcoBlok. The pollutants considered are those in the Pollutant Release and Transfer Register (PRTR), established by the Kiev Protocol under the Aarhus Convention, which covers nearly all pollutants invoked by the LCIA methods and is supported by international databases. The first step was to compare the relative importance attributed by each method to the range of pollutants. The second step was to compute equivalent pollution, as defined by each method, for nine major industrial sectors (energy, metallurgy, mining, chemicals, waste treatment, wood and paper, livestock, agri-food, and others), using available information of the PRTR-Europe database. The third step was to compare results provided by the different methods and examine similarities and differences between them. Results indicate that most methods converge in impact categories such as global warming and acidification potential. The most significant differences emerge in the human health and ecotoxicity impact categories, where the same pollutant may vary in relative importance by five orders of magnitude, from one method to the other; similar differences appear when comparing economic sectors in those impact categories. Although these are preliminary findings, it can be argued that the additional work required by some complex methods does not seem to be rewarded by more robust or useful results. Simpler methods may be as meaningful, more transparent and easier to use in practice by the industry.
Keywords: environmental indicators, life cycle assessment, pollution
