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Life cycle assessment (LCA) is sometimes referred to synonymously as life cycle analysis in the scholarly and agency report literatures. [7] [1] [8] Also, due to the general nature of an LCA study of examining the life cycle impacts from raw material extraction (cradle) through disposal (grave), it is sometimes referred to as "cradle-to-grave analysis".
Life-cycle assessment (LCA or life cycle analysis) is a technique used to assess potential environmental impacts of a product at different stages of its life. This technique takes a "cradle-to-grave" or a "cradle-to-cradle" approach and looks at environmental impacts that occur throughout the lifetime of a product from raw material extraction, manufacturing and processing, distribution, use ...
Life-cycle assessment is a "composite measure of sustainability." [19] It analyses the environmental performance of products and services through all phases of their life cycle: extracting and processing raw materials; manufacturing, transportation and distribution; use, re-use, maintenance; recycling, and final disposal.
Life cycle engineering is defined in the CIRP Encyclopedia of Production Engineering as: "the engineering activities which include the application of technological and scientific principles to manufacturing products with the goal of protecting the environment, conserving resources, encouraging economic progress, keeping in mind social concerns, and the need for sustainability, while optimizing ...
In other words, assessing its life cycle should yield a complete picture of the product. The first step in a life-cycle assessment is to gather data on the flow of a material through an identifiable society. Once the quantities of various components of such a flow are known, the important functions and impacts of each step in the production ...
The life cycle analysis is an important green engineering tool, which provides a holistic view of the entirety of a product, process or activity, encompassing raw materials, manufacturing, transportation, distribution, use, maintenance, recycling, and final disposal. Assessing its life cycle should yield a complete picture of the product.
The C2C concept ignores the use phase of a product. According to variants of life-cycle assessment (see: Life-cycle assessment § Variants) the entire life cycle of a product or service has to be evaluated, not only the material itself. For many goods e.g. in transport, the use phase has the most influence on the environmental footprint.
Combining such data sets can enable accounting for long chains (for example, building an automobile requires energy, but producing energy requires vehicles, and building those vehicles requires energy, etc.), which somewhat alleviates the scoping problem of traditional life-cycle assessments. EIO-LCA analysis traces out the various economic ...