It is abundantly clear for those of us that have been practicing life cycle assessment or promoting its use, that systems thinking approaches to product design has caught on and is here to stay. But before we pop the champagne and rest on our respective laurels, there’s still a lot of work to be done to ensure the further proliferation of its appropriate use:
1> Despite the existence of life cycle standards on nomenclature and structure of life cycle inventories (ISO 14048), international consensus does not exist on the data model, or to a greater extent the taxonomy of LCA – what we call things and how they fit together.
2> Basis for allocation – economic vs. all the rest! We need to decide when and where the proper allocation method should be applied for production systems that produce more than one product. Avoiding allocation is an approach, but it doesn’t work in all cases.
3> Open loop recycling calculation methods – there are ways to figure this out that are much better than the 50/50 method!
4> Setting cut off criteria – when is enough data, enough data! When your answer and its certainty doesn’t change with additional data. Easy to say, difficult to do in practice.
5> When it comes to life cycle impact assessment, there are only two categories that have achieved international agreement – energy and climate change. For the rest of the categories – you’re on your own. The collection of LCIA methods have been adhoc at best. There needs to be clear recommendations by LCA experts on the methods to use and where.
6> Demonstrated consensus based scientifically supported approaches to measure the impacts of products. This is a natural fit and applied use for LCA. We need to promote examples of when LCA based product assessments work.
Where do you think LCA needs to go? What other areas should LCA methodological developers and practitioners work to achieve greater application of this methodology?