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...

LCA is an environmental management tool for assessing the comprehensive environmental impacts of products, processes and activities. Assessment is undertaken along the life cycle from extraction of raw materials, through processing, manufacturing, transportation, use and on to final disposal. This is illustrated by reference to a study of breadmaking wheat production where the relative environm...

The effects of a pharmaceutical treatment have until now been evaluated by the field of Health Economics on the patient health benefits, expressed in Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) versus the monetary costs. However, there is also a Human Health burden associated with this process, resulting from emissions that originate from the pharmaceutical production processes, Use Phase and End of Li...

This article presents a study of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) at a slaughterhouse located in northwestern Mexico with the purpose of testing the premise of a low degree of institutionalization of Industrial Ecology in Mexico. The article aims at analyzing the current role played by the Mexican academia in increasing the degree of institutionalization of the concept of LCA in northwestern Mexico....

The environmental performance of wastewater and sewage sludge management is commonly assessed using life cycle assessment (LCA), whereas pathogen risk is evaluated with quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA). This study explored the application of QMRA methodology with intent to include pathogen risk in LCA and facilitate a comparison with other potential impacts on human health consider...

The integration of environmental impacts in the conceptual process design procedure can be achieved by combining Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) tools with flowsheeting software and process integration techniques. However, current LCI databases assume a given unit process chain for each product or waste, and do not allow for the systematic synthesis of the process chain minimizing the environmental...