Life Cycle Assessment of Additives: Methodology and Data

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a useful tool to assess impacts of cradle-to-grave chains of products/services. In the Riskcycle framework, the focus is on additives. Additives are usually minor constituents of products, but depending on their specific properties they can be important in the total scope of impacts of such products. In the LCA literature, additives are hardly visible. Most case studies of products containing additives do not mention them. The reasons for this are unclear, but are at least partly due to the fact that information on additives is not included in standard LCA databases. This is true for both life cycle inventory (LCI) and life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) databases. Therefore, it is difficult to conclude whether or not additives indeed are important contributors to environmental impacts over the life cycle.