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Co-Organized by:
U.S. EPA Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) Fellow in co-operation with United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) |
| Table of Contents Pre-Workshop Summary .............................................................................................................. vi Summary of Technical Issues Discussed .................................................................................... 1 Agenda........... 9 Remarks by Co-Chairs Life Cycle Impact Assessment Sophistication (Jane Bare, U.S. EPA, USA) LCIA Sophistication Issues Overview (David Pennington, ORISE Fellow, U.S. EPA, USA) Bio of Helias Udo de Haes, CML, The Netherlands Determination of Sophistication ISO Standards: Life Cycle Assessment & Comparative Assertions .............................................. 1 (J. Willie Owens, Procter & Gamble, USA) Impact Assessment for Ecodesign ............................................................................................... 25 (Mark Goedkoop, Pré Consultants, The Netherlands) Application Dependency of LCIA ................................................................................................... 31 (Henrik Wenzel, Technical University of Denmark) Impact Categories & Uncertainty Analysis within Human Toxicity & Ecotoxicity Types of Uncertainty in the Human Toxicity Potential .................................................................... 35 (Edgar Hertwich, University of California, Berkeley, USA) The Different Levels of Uncertainty Assessment in LCIA; The Case of Carcinogenic Effects .......... 39 (Patrick Hofstetter, Environmental Sciences: Natural and Social Science Interface, ETH Zurich) Human Toxicity and Ecotoxicity - Modeling versus Scoring ........................................................... 46 (Olivier Jolliet, EPFL, Switzerland) Priority Assessment of Toxic Substances in LCA—A Probabilistic Approach ................................ 54 (Mark Huijbregts, IVAM, Netherlands) Acidification, Eutrophication, and Tropospheric Ozone Implications of Inventory Structure for Life Cycle Impact Assessment and Uncertainty Analysis ........ 61 (Gregory A. Norris, Sylvatica, Maine, USA) Levels of Sophistication in Life Cycle Impact Assessment of Acidification ................................... 67 (José Potting and Michael Hauschild, Inst. for Product Development, Technical U. of Denmark) Eutrophication — Aquatic and Terrestrial — State of the Art ......................................................... 77 (Göran Finnveden, fms and Stockholm University) Appendix ..... 83 Preface
This is the report of the second workshop on a topic in the field of Life Cycle Assessment organized under the auspices of UNEP. The first one was held in June 1998 in San Francisco under the title “Towards a Global Use of LCA”. An important characteristic of that workshop was the strong input from experts of developing countries. The second workshop was in Brussels in November 1998, and focused on the sophistication of Life Cycle Impact Assessment. Since its coming out in the early seventies, the focus of LCA has been on the Inventory Analysis. Life Cycle Impact Assessment, or LCIA, was for a long time regarded “to be in an early stage of development”. This changed with two SETAC working groups, both in North America and Europe, and with the unifying guidance of the ISO process. In the coming ISO standard on LCIA only the framework of CIA will be defined. This still allows for very diverging types of analysis that all can claim to be ISO compatible. In itself there is nothing wrong with that, but a second SETAC-Europe working group on LCIAhas begun the process of providing more guidance in this area. An important issue in this field regards the present topic, the appropriate level of sophistication of LCIA. As will be clear from the present report, this involves quite a number of issues. A major point concerns the extension of the characterization modeling to include also the fate of the substances and not only their effects. Another issue concerns a possible differentiation in space and time. Studies can include impact models that use data just at world level and do not specify time periods; in contrast, more recent options involve spatial differentiation of impacts and distinguish between differ-ent time periods. A further point concerns the type of modeling. Traditionally LCIA uses linear model-ing, like in the Inventory Analysis; but more sophisticated possibilities arise which take background levels of substances into account and make use of nonlinear dose-response functions. An important question here is whether there are real science based thresholds, or whether these thresholds are always of a political origin. A further question relates to the role and practicality of including uncertainty analysis. Sensitivity analysis is increasingly included in LCA studies; but this is not yet the case for uncertainty analysis. Finally, there is the question of how to apply these different options for sophistication of LCIA; which applications can afford to keep it simple, and for which applications is a more detailed analysis needed? Like with the first workshop in this series, the partners in the process were the US EPA and Centre of Environmental Science (CML). We can expect that it will not be the last one. An issue that could only be touched upon indirectly during the second workshop concerns the choice of the category indicator in the environmental mechanism of an impact category. Should it be chosen at midpoint level, as is done traditionally in many categories, or should the modeling proceed up to the level of the category endpoints? We expect that this will be a topic for a third workshop in this series, to be organized in May 2000 in Brighton.
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