Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment Flashcards
Toolbox of Sustainable Engineering
Life Cycle Thinking → Carbon/Water Footprint → LCA → Eco-/ Resource-efficiency → LCSA
LCSA
Assessment of all sustainability dimensions of a product/service along its life cycle.
LCA + LCC + S-LCA
The results of each technique are read in combination with the results of the other techniques rather than summing them up.
LCSA - Goal and Scope
Describes the purpose, delimitation and the target audience of the study.
Functional unit
The inventory and impact indicators must be related to a common product functional unit.
Functional unit should describe the technical utility of the product and its social utility.
LCSA - Inventory
Compilation of exchanges between unit processes and organizations of the product system and the external environment which lead to environmental, economic and social impacts.
Data should be collected at the unit process and organizational level
LCC Data
- Equipments
- Energy sources
- Force labour
- Cost/Rent of the land
- Other taxes and expenses
Stakeholders more affected in each step:
- Extraction raw materials
- Product manufacturing
- Finishing step
- Extraction raw materials:
- Employees of extraction process
- Citizens close to the plant
- Employees of the adm. company
- Equipment suppliers
- Product manufacturing:
- Employees of manufacturing process
- Employees of adm. company
- Equipment suppliers
- Component suppliers
- Citizens close to the plant
- Finishing step:
- Employees of finishing process
- Employees of adm. company
- Citizens close to the plant
- Equipment suppliers
S-LCA
Requested and collected data
- Number of employees, age, wage, gender, working hours
- Kinds of the contracts
- % child labors
- Working accidents
S-LCA
Other qualitative and quantitative data at sectorial and municipal level
- Percentage of the foreign people working in the sector, with or without visa.
- % of child labour of the sector in that municipality
- Number of women discrimination cases
- Social impacts on the local communities
- Local administration’s awareness and interest
- % of the GDP of the sector
- Awareness and sensitivity for the social problems of the company’s administration
Life Cycle Sustainability Indicators
LCA:
- Embodied Energy
- Global Warming Potential
- human toxicity HTP inf.
- photochemical oxidation
- acidification
- eutrophication
LCC:
- extraction costs
- manufacturing costs
- finishing costs
- Waste disposal costs
- Electricity Costs
- Equipment costs
- Revenues
S-LCA:
- N°of employees
- N°of Female employees
- N°of male employees
- N°of employees with unlimited contract
- N°of employees with limited contract
- N°of accidents
- % Child Labour
Life Cycle Sustainability Dashboard - LCSD
- Macro written in EXCEL which allows comparison of two or more products based on scores and colours.
- The indicator sets used for LCA, LCC and S-LCA can be used and inserted in the LCSD database. All the inventory data for each considered product can be added within each technique (S-LCA, LCC and LCA).
- The tool ranks the totals obtained for each technique and presents the results in dark green for best performance and dark red for worst.
Comparison of results with LCSD
- The performance is given by a ranking score, obtained by filling in an Excel file the indicator values for each product where all indicators are grouped in the three main topics (LCA, LCC, SLCA, and institutional).
- The software compares the products’ performances for each indicator by ranking them from the best (with a score of 1,000, dark green) to the worst (with a score of 0, dark red). All other scores and colors are obtained by linear interpolation between these two extreme values.
- The topic score of each country is obtained by a weighted average of all indicator scores related to the topic. The weights can be changed according to technical considerations or stakeholder requests. The overall index is obtained by calculating an arithmetic average of all topic scores for each country.
LCSD - Strengths
- Integration of the different aspects of sustainability: environmental, economic and social factors.
- All indicators are related to the product chain, social indicators too.
- By using graphical and ranking representation the results are more understandable for expert and non-expert when the methodology is used for supporting the decision making process.
- The LCSD allows not to lose the original data that can be shown to the expert in the same time with the graphical representation
- The ability to present the complex results of LCSD can contribute to spread the use of Life Cycle Sustainability as a supporting tool of decision-making process.
LCSD - Weaknesses
- Finding social data directly related to the product chain and the functional unit is difficult.
- Use of the tool should be given to expert staff.
- The presentation of the evaluation results of different products in graphical and ranking representation cannot explain the intrinsic value of the used indicators.
- LCSD needs numerical data, but social indicators could be qualitative and quantitative, this could lead to exclude some important indicators from the evaluation process.
