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Life cycle assessment of products (LCA) has become a widely recognized method for quantifying the environmental performances of products. Numerical scores make it possible to compare product alternatives on the aspects of climate change, ozone depletion, acidification, eutrophication, toxicity, fossil energy resource depletion, and more environmental impact categories. All environmental releases, fossil energy resource extractions and land use activities that belong to a product life cycle are translated and aggregated in the right proportions to deliver an environmental profile in terms of the overall contribution of the product to a limited number of impact categories. A comparison of environmental profiles reveals the relative environmental performance of product alternatives in the context of every single impact category.
LCA normalization offers a reference situation of the pressure on the environment for each environmental impact category. Normalization makes it possible to translate abstract impact scores for every impact category into relative contributions of the product to a reference situation. This reference situation consists of an environmental profile on a higher scale -that is, the environmental profile of an economic system that the product life cycle is considered to be part of. The fact that the normalization results are expressed in the same unit for each impact score makes it easier to make comparisons between impact scores of different impact categories. Since product life cycles often have a global coverage
A number of normalization methods have appeared during the past10 years. An overview is given in Table6.1. Some methods are shown to be specific for a limited region or for a limited number of impact categories.
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