A Monetary Valuation Weighting Method for Life Cycle Assessment Based on Environmental Taxes and Fees

Weighting in life cycle assessment (LCA) is a controversial subject due to its dependence upon value judgements. One of the issues that has to be dealt with is whose values that shall be reflected. In a democratic society, a fair candidate to put forward would be the government. In environmental economics taxes and fees set up by governments to protect natural resources and the environment are sometimes used as an approximation of the monetary value of these assets. In this master thesis a new set of weighting factors for LCA, based on Swedish environmental taxes and fees will be presented. Weighting factors are derived for the most commonly used impact categories. The weighting factors are also combined with different sets of characterisation factors, in order to obtain one-step weighting factors that may be applied directly on inventory data. An estimation of the uncertainty in the valuation is obtained when alternative weighting factors are combined with different sets of characterisation factors.