Life Cycle Assessment: Past, Present, and Future

TLDR

Environmental life cycle assessment has evolved from energy analysis in the 1970s to comprehensive environmental, impact, costing, social, and consequential analyses, and is now expanding into a transdisciplinary Life Cycle Sustainability Analysis framework. The study aims to broaden environmental LCA into Life Cycle Sustainability Analysis and tackle the challenge of structuring, selecting, and making disciplinary models available for diverse sustainability questions. The authors propose a framework that links sustainability questions to required knowledge, identifies available models and gaps, and guides the selection of appropriate disciplinary models.

Abstract

Environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) has developed fast over the last three decades. Whereas LCA developed from merely energy analysis to a comprehensive environmental burden analysis in the 1970s, full-fledged life cycle impact assessment and life cycle costing models were introduced in the 1980s and 1990 s, and social-LCA and particularly consequential LCA gained ground in the first decade of the 21st century. Many of the more recent developments were initiated to broaden traditional environmental LCA to a more comprehensive Life Cycle Sustainability Analysis (LCSA). Recently, a framework for LCSA was suggested linking life cycle sustainability questions to knowledge needed for addressing them, identifying available knowledge and related models, knowledge gaps, and defining research programs to fill these gaps. LCA is evolving into LCSA, which is a transdisciplinary integration framework of models rather than a model in itself. LCSA works with a plethora of disciplinary models and guides selecting the proper ones, given a specific sustainability question. Structuring, selecting, and making the plethora of disciplinary models practically available in relation to different types of life cycle sustainability questions is the main challenge.