Comparing LCA results out of competing products: developing reference ranges from a product family approach

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has proven useful in comparing the environmental impact of alternatives, life-cycle phases or parts in a product. To date, benchmarking a new product with previous environmental information entails a degree of subjectivity. This paper presents LCP-families, a concept to develop reference ranges for environmental impact of a new product. A new product can be catalogued as environmentally better or worse than a percentage of its competitors, depending on what position it occupies in its LCP-family. This paper ties to Fuon Theory, where functional icons are suggested to phrase standardized functional units. Having functional unit parameters at hand, products that can be described by these parameters can be put into one family. This further helps to compare the environmental performances of products that fall into the same family. In this paper, a fuon for digital storage devices is developed and tested. The fuon can be used to phrase the functional units of different products, and three case studies of packaging products are carried out to show the applicability and usefulness of the concepts presented.

Authors: Daniel Collado-Ruiz and Hesamedin Ostad-Ahmad-Ghorabi Journal: Journal of Cleaner Production Year: 2010