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Life cycle assessment and management

29 December, 2015 - 11:56

Life cycle management (LCM) refers to the process of managing the entire product life cycle from idea to disposal. According to Grieves (2006), it is:

. . . . an integrated, information-driven approach comprised of people, processes/practices, and technology to all aspects of a product's life, from its design through manufacture, deployment and maintenance — culminating in the product's removal from service and final disposal. By trading product information for wasted time, energy, and material across the entire organization and into the supply chain, PLM drives the next generation of lean thinking (Grieves 2006, 39).

Among the various tools in LCM is life cycle assessment (LCA), which is a method for identifying and evaluating the environmental impacts of a product over its entire life cycle.

Read the excerpt from the European Commission's International Reference Life Cycle Data System (ILCD) Handbook, which gives a general introduction to LCA.

About Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)


From European Commission, Joint Research Centre (2010) International Reference Life Cycle Data System (ILCD) Handbook: General Guide for Life Cycle Assessment — Detailed Guidance (EUR 24708 EN – 2010), 'Executive summary', 4.

Read the complete article at the following website.

Reading

Green Options, using material from Wikipedia (2012) 'Life-cycle assessments'.

As mentioned in the reading, an advantage of LCA is that it allows us to compare the environmental performance of products, and then to come up with decisions that lead to the least substantial environmental impacts.

You can see that many major businesses now recognize the advantages of LCA and are willing to spend substantial resources in implementing it.

The following two cases studies deal with 3M and ABB Ltd.

Reading

Read the following two case studies:  

The definition of LCA is constantly evolving, and different companies of course implement it differently. Nevertheless, standards/frameworks have been developed for companies to follow and implement their LCA systematically. Recent LCM and LCA developments are taking into consideration not only environmental impacts, but also product safety and health issues.

You should now be ready to tackle the Self-test 2 for this section.