Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a widely accepted method for analysing the environmental aspects of goods and services. Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) datasets document the various involved material and energy flows, forming the basis of every LCA study. Today, a plurality of databases providing LCI data exists. Data delivered by these databases has to be sound as well as suitable for the specific a...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) evaluates the environmental impact of a product through its entire life cycle, from material extraction to final disposal or recycling. The environmental impacts of an activity depend on both the activity’s direct emissions to the environment as well as indirect emissions caused by activities elsewhere in the supply chain. Both the impacts of direct emissions and the...

Information Systems (IS) play an important role for the sustainable development of business organisations. New metrics and methodologies are required to explore the interactions between IS, organisations and the environment. The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology already proved its ability to measure environmental impacts of complex systems in other industries. However, when trying to adop...

Material efficiency is a key element of new thinking to address the challenges of reducing 12 impacts on the environment and of resource scarcity, whilst at the same time meeting service and 13 functionality demands on materials. Directly related to material efficiency is the concept of the 14 Circular Economy, which is based on the principle of optimising the utility embodied in materials 15 a...

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a systematic evaluation of the potential environmental impact and resource utilization of a product from raw material through disposal. Underlying the LCA is the Life Cycle Inventory or LCI, a quantification of energy and material inputs and environmental release or emissions data associated with product creation and use. The primary purpose of this project was to...

In recent years Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) software tools have become increasingly important. Today a large number of LCA programs are available. The large diversity of LCA software tools on offer makes it necessary to first pinpoint some general requirements that determine the quality of an LCA software tool and secondly to describe these requirements qualitatively. The authors last year asse...

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 ...

Assessing the life-cycle impacts of operations and maintenance decisions made for new or aging systems requires the an accurate ability to measure and respond to uncertainty. Maintenance and parts requirements forecasts for fielded military systems are traditionally performed through historical repair and supply demand models. These models work well once several years of steady state weapon sys...

This study aims to quantify and compare the life-cycle environmental, economic and social impacts of two pavement materials: namely 10mm Asphalt Rubber Stone Matrix Asphalt (ARSMA10) and 10mm Polymer Modified Stone Matrix Asphalt (PMSMA10). To achieve this objective, a comparative sustainability framework was developed by: 1) combining the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) with pavement maintenance p...

This paper explores the robustness of materials selection decisions when using various life-cycle assessment methods. Improving the environmental performance of vehicles is a topic of growing concern met by today’s designer. One approach to this goal is through vehicle mass reduction, enabled through the implementation of a growing array of material candidates. While LCA methods are available t...