Distance-to-target weighting methods are widely used in life cycle impact assessment. The methods rank impacts as being more important the further away society's activities are from achieving the desired targets for the pollutants. However, we feel that the scientific bases of the distance-to-target methods still need more clarification. This article illustrates how multiattribute value theory ...

In recent years, environmental sustainability has received widespread attention due to continued depletion of natural resources and degradation of the environment. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a methodology for quantifying multiple environmental impacts of a product, across its entire life cycle – from creation to use to discard. The key object of interest in LCA is the inventory tree, with t...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a popular tool for evaluating environmental impacts of products and services. However, the methodological choices and framework to assess environmental impacts in LCA are still under discussion. Despite intensive development worldwide, few attempts have been made hitherto to systematically present the theoretical bases of life cycle impact assessment (LCIA). In th...

Keywords decision analysis life-cycle impact assessment (LCIA) methods multiple attribute multiple-criteria decision analysis (MCDA) normalization Summary Life-cycle impact assessments (LCIAs) are complex because they almost always involve uncertain consequences relative to multiple criteria. Several authors have noticed that this is precisely the sort of problem addressed by methods of decisio...

Modern technology, together with an advanced economy, can provide a good or service in myriad ways, giving us choices on what to produce and how to produce it. To make those choices more intelligently, society needs to know not only the market price of each alternative, but the associated health and environmental consequences. A fair comparison requires evaluating the consequences across the wh...

The main objectives of this task group under SETAC-Europe’s Second Working Group on Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA-WIA2) were to identify and discuss the suitability of toxicological impact measures for human health for use in characterization in LCIA. The current state of the art of defining health indicators in LCIA is summarized in this document, promising approaches are addressed in fur...

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Environmental impact assessment (EIA) is a procedure tool of environmental management for identifying, predicting, evaluating and mitigating the adverse effects of development proposals. EIA reports usually analyze how the amounts or concentrations of pollutants obey the relevant standards. Actually, many analytical tools can deepen the analysis of environmental impacts in EIA reports, such as ...