LifecycleAssessmentAnforderungen

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a systematic framework for evaluating the environmental aspects and potential impacts associated with a product, process, or service throughout its life cycle—from raw material extraction (cradle) to disposal or recycling (grave). It supports comparative analyses and optimization in design, purchasing, and policy decisions.

The standard practice comprises four phases: goal and scope definition; life cycle inventory analysis (LCI), where data on energy, materials, and emissions are collected; life cycle impact assessment (LCIA), which translates inventory results into environmental impacts; and interpretation to draw conclusions and propose improvements.

LCA can examine different system boundaries, such as cradle-to-grave, cradle-to-gate, or gate-to-gate. There are two main methodological approaches: attributional LCA, which allocates burdens among co-products, and consequential LCA, which attempts to model the environmental consequences of a decision or change in demand.

International standards ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 provide principles, framework, and requirements for conducting LCAs. Practitioners use life cycle inventory databases (for example, Ecoinvent) and software tools (such as SimaPro or GaBi) to build models, run scenarios, and assess uncertainties.

Applications include product design optimization, sustainability reporting, green procurement, and policy evaluation. Limitations involve data quality and availability, the influence of boundary and allocation choices, and the inherent uncertainties of modeling complex environmental interactions, which require careful interpretation.