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1 Introduction into LCA with SimaPro 5
1.1 Introduction
This manual provides general information about the backgrounds of the life
cycle assessment methodology, and provides practical advice on how to
perform LCA studies. It can be read without having SimaPro in front of you.
Chapter 2, 3 and 4 describe the LCA methodology in general. Apart from some
text boxes, these chapters make no direct reference to SimaPro. Chapter 5
describes organisational aspects of LCA, while only chapter 6 deals with the
way you model life cycles in SimaPro.
Once we have introduced you to the most important concepts and terminology,
we suggest you start up SimaPro and perform your first experiments. We have
devoted much effort in developing clear help texts. If you want to know more,
press F1 to get help on the issue you are currently dealing with. The help files
are also available as Reference Manual in PDF format.
Other SimaPro manuals, such as the database manuals, can be found as PDF
files on the installation CD-ROM.
1.2 Defining applications of LCA
in your organisation
Life cycle assessment is a technique for assessing the environmental aspects
associated with a product over its life cycle. The most important applications are:
Analysis of the contribution of the life cycle stages to the overall
environmental load, usually with the aim to prioritise improvements
on products or processes.
Comparison between products for internal or internal communications.
LCA is a relatively young technique; it became popular in the early nineties.
Initially many thought that LCA would be a very good tool to support
environmental claims that could directly be used in marketing. Over the
years, it has become clear that this is not the best application for LCA,
although it is clearly important to communicate LCA results in a careful and
well-balanced way.
A recent survey on how LCA is used [Rubik and Frankl] shows that the most
common reasons for the application of LCA are for internal purposes:
Product improvement
Support for strategic choices
Benchmarking
External communication
The same study also shows two different adoption patterns of LCA in
companies:
Bottom up: someone in the organisation decides to investigate the
usefulness of LCA for his organisation.
Top down: Top management decides to systematically apply LCA.
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Both strategies turn out to be successful, although in both approaches some
major pitfalls can lead to failure in the adoption process. The most important
pitfall is the lack of a clear definition of the purpose and application of LCA.