4: Life Cycle Thinking Flashcards
What is life cycle thinking?
Life cycle thinking:
- the process of accounting for all the impacts of a product or process across all stages of its lifecycle
What are the 5 stages in a product lifecycle?
- Raw materials extraction
- design and manufacturing
- packaging and distribution
- use and maintenance
- end of life disposal or decomissioining
What are the 5 end-of-life options for a product? Which ones are desirable?
undesirable:
incineration or landfills - release contaminants into environment
desirable:
recovery - extracting as much energy or material from the product
recycling - producing something new from the materials in the original product
reuse - reuse the product in its current state (repurpose for something else)
how is energy and waste relevant to life cycle thinking?
energy and waste:
- at each stage, energy is consumed and waste is created
- not exclusive to product development (businesses require electricity, heat, equipment, and supplies)
- recovery, recycling, and reuse all consume energy
- some materials can only be recycled a limited number of times
What is a life cycle assessment (LCA)?
life cycle assessment (LCA):
- an approach to assess impacts at each life cycle stage of a product
more detailed:
- a systematic evaluation of the impacts of energy and material inputs and outputs for a product or process across all of its life cycle stages
4 interrelated stages:
- goal definition and scope
- inventory analysis
- impact assessment
- interpretation (related to all 3 stages above)
Elaborate on the goal definition and scope stage of a LCA
goal definition and scope:
- here, we define the system boundaries, aka, what do we include in our analysis across which life cycle stages
ex/ will raw material extraction and end of life considerations be included, or only production through to use?
- scope is informed by our goal for the analysis
What is a functional unit?
functional unit:
- a reference unit of performance used to compare different systems or solutions in an LCA
Elaborate on the Inventory Analysis stage of an LCA
Inventory analysis:
- identification of all materials and energy flows in and out of the system boundaries
- very DETAILED, TIME CONSUMING process
- need precise information on how much of each material is used, source, how much it’s processed, waste created, etc.
elaborate on the impact analysis stage of an LCA
Impact analysis:
- impacts of each material and energy flow are quantified
ex/
- equivalent weight of CO2 having same environment impact
- release of toxic substances
- pollution of air and water
- acidification of soil and water
- depletion of resources
- water use
- energy use
Elaborate on the Interpretation stage of an LCA
Interpretation:
- Similar to iteration in the design process: here we re-evaluate our information and check our work in each stage as we acquire new information
What can a LCA identify?
LCA can help to identify areas of greatest impact, giving focus on where a design or process can be improved most significantly
What are some challenges with an LCA?
Challenges:
- time consuming and involved
- best suited to refining an existing product or at the end of a design process when detailed information is available for the product or process
- a tad too focused on environmental impacts only
What is a streamlined life cycle assessment (SLCA)?
it’s just a simple LCA
- qualitative assessment of the performance of a product or process for a number of criteria across the 5 life cycle stages
- more flexible in criteria chosen (both number and type)
- faster than an LCA, but less precise
What is the most common way to represent an SLCA? how should be choose the criteria? how are the rankings assigned? what do we ultimately obtain?
common way to represent SLCA:
- a matrix or a graph
How to choose criteria:
- criteria that are related to one or more dimensions of sustainability should be chosen
- criteria together should give a complete and balanced measure of what we’re trying to assess with the SLCA
how to rank:
- criteria is evaluated simply (1-5) using judgement
Result:
- We can obtain a “Responsible Product Rating”, or R_ERP value
- it can be calculated by summing the entries in the matrix (or graph)
