Ecodesign — Carbon Footprint — Life Cycle Assessment — Life Cycle Sustainability Analysis. A Flexible Framework for a Continuum of Tools

Reinout Heijungs

doi:10.2478/v10145-010-0016-5

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Ecodesign — Carbon Footprint — Life Cycle Assessment — Life Cycle Sustainability Analysis. A Flexible Framework for a Continuum of Tools

Environmental and Climate Technologies

Volume 4 (2010): Issue -1 (June 2010)

By: Reinout Heijungs

Open Access

|Jan 2011

Abstract

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a tool for answering questions related to environmental impacts of products. It is a comprehensive tool, addressing the entire life cycle, and addressing the full spectrum of environmental impacts. There are two opposite movements occurring: LCA is getting smaller, and it is getting broader. This presentation presents the general framework for a broader life cycle sustainability analysis (LCSA), and shows how the practical work related to doing an LCA, a carbon footprint, or an analysis for ecodesign, can be seen as special cases.

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