Social Life Cycle Assessment Revisited

Methodologies for Social Life Cycle Assessment*

Goal, Scope and Background. In recent years several different approaches towards Social Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA) have been developed. The purpose of this review is to compare these approaches in order to highlight methodological differences and general shortcomings. SLCA has several similarities with other social assessment tools, although, in order to limit the expanse of the review, only ...

Energy Life‐cycle Assessment of Soybean Biodiesel Revisited

The first comprehensive life‐cycle assessment (LCA) for soybean biodiesel produced in the U.S. was completed by the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in 1998, and the energy inventory for this analysis was updated in 2009 using 2002 data. The continual adoption of new technologies in farming, soybean processing, and for biodiesel conversion affects the life‐cycle energy use over time,...

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