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Life cycle inventory (LCI) analysis involves creating an inventory of flows from and to nature (ecosphere) for a product system. [32] It is the process of quantifying raw material and energy requirements, atmospheric emissions, land emissions, water emissions, resource uses, and other releases over the life cycle of a product or process. [ 33 ]
Although the life cycle assessments of each energy source should attempt to cover the full life cycle of the source from cradle-to-grave, they are generally limited to the construction and operation phase. The most rigorously studied phases are those of material and fuel mining, construction, operation, and waste management.
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 ...
While this kind of analysis seems costly and unnecessary, at enterprise scales over many years, significant cost savings can be realized. [ citation needed ] For example, the LORA process may discover that replacing a part actually costs hundreds of times that amount, when all cost are considered (maintenance manpower, warehousing facilities ...
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 cost analysis (LCCA) is an economic analysis tool to determine the most cost-effective option to purchase, run, sustain or dispose of an object or process. The method is popular in helping managers determine economic sustainability by figuring out the life cycle of a product or process.
The concept of life cycle analysis evolved since the concept was initially considered in the 1970s and 1980s, [3] when life cycle studies focused on the quantifying the energy and raw resources used by a building, and the load on the sewerage and sanitation systems imposed by waste generated in the building, during the operational life of the structure.
Material flow analysis (MFA), also referred to as substance flow analysis (SFA), is an analytical method to quantify flows and stocks of materials or substances in a well-defined system. MFA is an important tool to study the bio-physical aspects of human activity on different spatial and temporal scales.