Abstract
Providing our society with goods and services contributes
to a wide
range of environmental impacts. Waste generation, emissions, and the
consumption of resources occur at many stages in a product life cycle
from raw material extractction, energy acquisition, production and
manufacturing, use, reuse, recycling, through to ultimate disposal.
These all contribute to impacts such as climate change, stratospheric
ozone depletion, photooxidant formation (smog), eutrophication,
acidification, toxicological stress on human health and ecosystems, the
depletion of resources, and noise among others.
The need exists to address these product-related contributions more
holistically and in an integrated manner, providing complimentary
insights to those of regulatory/process-orientated methodologies. A
previous article (Part 1) outlined how to define and model a product
life cycle in current practice., as well as the methods and tools that
are available for compiling the associated waste, emissions, and
resource consumption data into a life cycle inventory. This article
highlights how practitioners and researchers from many domains have
come together to provide indicators for the different impacts
attributable to products in the life cycle impact assessment (LCIA)
phase of LCA.
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