Assessing the life-cycle impacts of operations and maintenance decisions made for new or aging systems requires 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 system ...

The work presents the results of some case studies oriented toward the investigation of the potential of Life Cycle Assessment evaluations in the area of environmental impacts related to the life cycle of buildings. In particular, the aspects connected with the performance behavior of building components (and of the entire building organisms) are dealt, in relation to users’ needs which are cha...

Chemical product-process design challenges the developers to find designs that are not only technically and economically optimal but also environmentally acceptable. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a tool that helps to quantify the potential environmental impacts in order to select the optimal design from various feasible alternatives. This paper presents a new LCA software, LCSoft, which is exc...

A Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) was assembled for gold production extending from the formation of gold-ore deposits through the production of semi-refined gold-silver bullion. Inputs traditionally considered in life cycle assessment (LCA) such as energy, materials, and capital were counted along with geologic inputs and labor. Emergy, rather than traditional LCA methods, was used to make inventory...

Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is a cornerstone of current practice in industrial ecology, linking the product life cycle, from design to disposition, with the environmental impacts generated at each stage. It is one of the ways that industrial ecology brings a systems approach to environmental analysis. LCA aids environmental improvement by revealing the complete impact of a product, rather than ...

In our globalised economy, important stakeholder groups nowadays hold companies responsible for the social impacts they cause in their product chain through activities like child labour, corruption or discrimination of employees. Many companies thus see themselves in need of a tool which can help them make informed decisions about their social impacts throughout the life cycle of their products...

This document summarizes 2 larger, more detailed, and recently completed workgroup reports on Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) (see Barnthouse et al. 1997 and Udo de Haes 1996). The Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) Steering Committee of SETAC Europe and the LCA Advisory Group of the Society of Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) were workgroup sponsors. The objectives of the 2 workgrou...

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is the standard technique used to make a quantitative evaluation about the ecological sustainability of a product or service. The life cycle inventory (LCI) data sets that provide input to LCA computations can express essential information about the operation of a process or production step. As a consequence, LCI data are often regarded as confidential and are typica...