life cycle assessment impact categories
Taking the entire product life cycle into consideration from resource extraction to production use and disposal guarantees an integrated evaluation of all inputs and outputs thus. Assigning the elementary flows to the impact categories. While initially an energy analysis this tool has evolved to cover the environmental and social.
The life cycle assessment or lca is a measurement of a product s impact throughout its life cycle.
Life cycle assessment impact categories. Life cycle assessment or lca also known as life cycle analysis is a methodology for assessing environmental impacts associated with all the stages of the life cycle of a commercial product process or service. In this context the term product also includes services. In the last step of our impact assessment we are finally calculating all our equivalents. Life cycle impact assessment lcia is the phase of an lca where the evaluation takes place of the potential environmental impacts stemming from the elementary flows environmental resources and releases obtained in the lci.
Across most impact categories the environmental intensity of the use phase electricity is the single most influential variable in the ev life cycle see figure 2 for gwp and section iii of supporting information s1 on the web for others. We are summing them up in overall impact category totals. For instance in the case of a manufactured product environmental impacts are assessed from raw material extraction and processing cradle through the product s manufacture. Lcia consists of the following steps.
Category totals can look. Life cycle assessment lca is a very popular analysis for reporting potential environmental loads and resources consumed in each step of a product or service supply chain. Selecting the relevant impact categories. If only the climate change impact is included within the scope of the lca then the assessment is in fact an embodied carbon assessment.
In this step of our life cycle impact assessment we are sorting our life cycle inventory and assigning it to our defined impact categories. A life cycle assessment lca or life cycle analysis is a method to calculate the environmental impact of a product over its entire life cycle. A life cycle assessment lca is defined as the systematic analysis of the potential environmental impacts of products or services during their entire life cycle. Our sensitivity analysis predicts net benefits in terms of tap pmfp and pofp for evs using electricity.
The environmental impact categories chosen e g. Based on a comparative assessment of the current beyond burger production system with the 2017 beef lca by thoma et al the beyond burger generates 90 less greenhouse gas emissions requires 46 less energy has 99 less impact on water scarcity and 93 less impact on land use than a pound of u s.