Input-output life cycle assessment: from theory to applications 16th discussion forum on life cycle assessment Lausanne, April 10, 2002

Economic Input-Output Models for Environmental Life-Cycle Assessment

Process and product models are commonly used for performing life-cycle assessments (LCAs) of the environmental impacts of materials and products through different stages of fabrication, use, and end-of-life options. In this article, we show that these models can be represented as process flow diagrams or as matrices of process interactions. In either representation, the inventory of environment...

Product Environmental Life-Cycle Assessment Using Input-Output Techniques

Life-cycle assessment (LCA) facilitates a systems view in environmental evaluation of products, materials, and processes. Life-cycle assessment attempts to quantify environmental burdens over the entire life-cycle of a product from raw material extraction, manufacturing, and use to ultimate disposal. However, current methods for LCA suffer from problems of subjective boundary definition, inflex...

Food Polymeric Packaging Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)

  Food packaging is used to maintain the safety and quality of food during distribution and storage and to protect them from adverse internal and external conditions, such as water vapor, spoilage due to microorganisms, moisture, light, and dust. In this regard, lots of research studies have been done to increase shelf life, safety, and quality to create suitable physico...

Multiscale Life-Cycle Assessment

A streamlined life-cycle assessment (SLCA) is typically performed at the scale of the completed product. One could also, however, perform SLCAs on components or subsystems (moving down in scale) or on all a corporation’s products (moving up in scale). By analogy with biological ecology, it seems likely that analyses at different scales would ask different questions and reveal different insights...

Comparative Life Cycle Assessment