Practical LCA for short shelf life products

ABSTRACT Manufacturers in many of today’s industries are faced with product shelf life counted in months. Traditionally, this has made it very difficult to make a life cycle assessment (LCA) of a product, since the product would be obsolete by the time the LCA was completed. A new concept in LCA that allows specialists in things other than LCA to rapidly create both a model and generate “what-if” scenarios will allow even manufacturers of short shelf life products take advantage of the benefits of LCA. These industry-specific “wizards” are built around a manufacturing process and can be rapidly updated or customized to a particular manufacturer or process type. Results can be used internally for decision-making and can also enable manufacturers submit information for environmentally preferable purchasing, eco-labels, etc. Keywords: Life Cycle Assessment, environmental impact and assessment, design for environment, time-to-market 1. INTRODUCTION Faced with the goal of improving the environmental performance of their products, produce designers are often left in a quandary. With a few exceptions, this goal is like a goal of “more likeable” products. What is environmental performance? How do you measure it? How do you know that you haven’t traded one environmental impact for another? Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a well-established method of looking at the environmental impacts of a product from raw materials extraction through disposal. This technique has been standardized through ISO (standards 14040-14045) and is considered credible and scientific for analyzing a product, evaluating potential improvements, and, with special consideration, comparing competing products. Traditionally, creating an LCA takes a significant amount of time—weeks or even months, so has been an impractical tool for designers, especially for products with shelf lives counted in months. The traditional solution for design tools is to hide the complexity of the real world behind simplistic rules of thumb or coarse indicators. The problem with rules of thumb is that they do not always apply, and may even contradict one another. For example, one rule for reducing impacts states that you should minimize material use. This could guide designers into thinking high tech fiber reinforced materials are a good thing. The next rule tells designers they should use materials that can be easily recycled, which indicates they should not use fiber-reinforced materials. These types of design rules do not help designers in making tradeoffs, and making tradeoffs is a core challenge in environmentally conscious design. The other traditional solution is to develop simple indicators per type of material, per process, or per unit of process output. This solution does a much better job in helping designers to make trade-offs. The problem here, however, is that creating these indicators is not always straightforward. For instance, how do you express limited recyclability as an indicator? One could choose only relatively simple indicators, like embodied energy, but then you only cover part of the environmental problem. Once you have identified the indicators and determined how to calculate them, you still need to be able to meaningfully compare one indictor with another. At what point do you consider global warming over toxicity, for example. A new concept will allow even designers of short shelf life products take advantage of the benefits of LCA .This method allows specialists in things other than LCA to rapidly create a full-scale LCA model, to view results, and to generate and compare “what-if” scenarios. These industry-specific “wizards” are built around a similar set of products and can be rapidly updated or customized to a particular manufacturer or process type. Results can be used both internally and