Efficient Software support for Interpretation of Life Cycle Assessment Results - The LCA Evaluator

Abstract

Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) are increasingly recognised as a means to assess the environmental performance of products in a holistic and reliable manner, with increased use for supporting decisions in business and policy. LCAs typically provide information on product-related impacts in a variety of different (environmental) impact categories. When comparing the impacts of different products, then diverging results for single categories often cause problems in the interpretation. They require the consideration of trade-offs between impact categories to come to an overall conclusion, and thus require introducing value choices. The German EPA has developed a structured approach for the interpretation of LCA impact category results, intended to be applied by a panel of environmental experts. The approach introduces value choices stepwise into the interpretation procedure and comes to a conclusion with not more value choices than necessary, ensuring that the recommendation obtained is as objective as possible. However, the method is rather time-consuming and also error-prone in the application, especially in contrast to methods proposed for the same purpose that provide an interpretation proposal in one step. We present a new software tool, The LCA Evaluator, to be used for interpretation of LCA results, where the German EPA method and other evaluation methods are implemented. The implementation in software reduces the application time drastically, it reduces errors in application, and it allows considering uncertainties in impact category data via Monte Carlo simulation. We investigate the problem of value choices in the interpretation, briefly introduce evaluation methods for LCAs, briefly present the new tool discussing also drawbacks of the application, and demonstrate the use by a case study