6.1 Fundamentals of LCA

6.1.1 Outline of life cycle assessment

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) address the environmental impact of the target product or service throughout their life cycles; so called “from the cradle to the grave”, and measures the amounts of resources consumption and the emissions of all the stages from raw material acquisition through production, use, end-of-life treatment and final disposal (inventory analysis), then evaluating the impact based on the results of the inventory analysis (impact assessment).

International standard (ISO-14040) provides “Principles and framework” of LCA. ISO-14040 defins LCA as “LCA is one of the techniques being developed to better understand and address the impacts from products, both manufactured and consumed, including possible impacts associated

with”. ISO-14040 also clearly shows the four phases for conducting LCA: “Goal and scope definition”, “Inventory analysis”, “Impact assessment”, and “Interpretation” (Fig. 6.1.1).