New Direction of Development in Environmental Life Cycle Assessment

Life cycle assessment (LCA) techniques have grown increasingly popular as a means of analyzing the environmental impacts produced throughout the entire life cycles of products. An overview is presented of the limitations associated with conventional process-based LCA (P-LCA), including incompleteness resulting from the omission of environmental loads on the higher upstream orders of product system (also known as truncation error). The benefits offered by integration of conventional P-LCA techniques with the economic Input Output Analysis paradigm are detailed. This approach provides tools for analysis of problems that have remained unsolvable in the past.