Guidelines for consistent reporting of exchanges/to nature within life cycle inventories (LCI)

Data availability and data quality are still critical factors for successful LCA work. The SETAC-Europe LCA Working Group ‘Data Availability and Data Quality' has therefore focused on ongoing developments toward a common data exchange format, public databases and accepted quality measures to find science-based solutions than can be widely accepted. A necessary prerequisite for the free flow and exchange of life cycle inventory (LCI) data and the comparability of LCIs is the consistent definition, nomenclature, and use of inventory parameters. This is the main subject of the subgroup ‘Recommended List of Exchanges' that presents its results and findings here: • Rigid parameter lists for LCIs are not practical; especially, compulsory lists of measurements for all inventories are counterproductive. Instead, practitioners should be obliged to give the rationale for their scientific choice of selected and omitted parameters. The standardized (not: mandatory!) parameter list established by the subgroup can help to facilitate this. • The standardized nomenclature of LCI parameters and the standardized list of measurement bases (units) for these parameters need not be appliedinternally (e.g. in LCA software), but should be adhered to inexternal communications (data for publication and exchange). Deviations need to be clearly stated. • Sum parameters may or may not overlap - misinterpretations in either direction introduce a bias of unknown significance in the subsequent life cycle impact assessments (LCIA). The only person who can discriminate unambiguously is the practitioner who measures or calculates such values. Therefore, a clear statement of independence or overlap is necessary for every sum parameter reported. • Sum parameters should be only used when the group of emissions as such is measured. Individually measured emission parameters should not be hidden in group or sum parameters. • Problematic substances (such as carcinogens, ozone depleting agents and the like) maynever be obscured in group emissions (together with less harmful substances or with substances of different environmental impact), butmust be determined and reported individually, as mentioned in paragraph 3.3 of this article. • Mass and energy balances should be carried out on a unit process level. Mass balances should be done on the level of the entire mass flow in a process as well as on the level of individual chemical elements. • Whenever possible, practitioners should try to fill data gaps with their knowledge of analogous processes, environmental expert judgements, mass balance calculations, worst case assumptions or similar estimation procedure

On the reporting and review requirements of ISO 14044

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Environmental Footprint Neutrality Using Methods and Tools for Natural Capital Accounting in Life Cycle Assessment

Natural Capital Accounting (NCA) is becoming a reference tool for an increasing number of organizations transitioning towards environmental impact neutrality. However, one NCA technique applicable to all types of actors (individual, community, company, etc.) is missing because of the lack of consensus on how to quantify both their environmental impacts and dependencies on ecosystems. A coupled systematic and non-systematic review of the grey and scientific literature is performed here to (i) make an extensive review of state-of-the-art NCA methods, identifying their current utilization and limitations, and (ii) discern prospects about the challenges of integrating an Ecosystem Service Accounting in Life Cycle Assessment (ESA-LCA). While NCA methods can extensively evaluate the supply of ES, they tend to disregard the quantification of environmental impacts that imply a demand for ES. The ESA-LCA approach is identified as a robust solution to balance supply and demand of ecosystem services in NCA, allowing private and public actors to quantify their distance from impact neutrality targets. A novel definition of NC(A) in LCA is also formulated to support these future efforts, promoting a Mitigation Hierarchy-based strategy to avoid, minimize, restore, and offset impacts, and outlining a roadmap for practitioners to apply ESA-LCA across multiple economic sectors

Benchmark of Circularity Indicators and Links with Life Cycle Assessment

International audienceDeploying the right circularity indicators (c-indicators) is key to assessing and improving the performance of products, companies, and regions from a circular economy (CE) perspective. Building on the initial taxonomy of c-indicators, this project extends the identification of sets of c-indicators to more than 100. Working with a think tank of CE experts from major French industrial companies, five new features have been added to better characterize a set of c-indicators to its practical use in an industrial context. These new features are: (i) CE spheres considered, (ii) life cycle stages covered, (iii) the availability of use cases, (iv) the popularity, and (v) transparency. Statistical trends and critical analysis on these c-indicators are then given. On this basis, a set of ten complementary c-indicators is particularly proposed, covering a wider spectrum of the CE paradigm, including, e.g., material flow, energy flow, impact, design, and corporate-based indicators. In practice, to support decision-makers in the industry (e.g., managers, engineers, product leaders, designers) compute and deploy appropriately these c-indicators, a new and highly visual factsheet for c-indicators is developed. Last but not least, discussion on the articulation, positioning, and potential trade-offs between c-indicators and LCA-based indicators are made through different scenarios and illustrative examples

L' Analyse de cycle de vie et l'éco-conception au service de l'amélioration des performances environnementales des procédés

L' Analyse de cycle de vie et l'éco-conception au service de l'amélioration des performances environnementales des procédés. 13. Journées Sciences du Muscle et Technologies des Viande