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Definition
Environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a method of quantifying the environmental impacts of a project, examining its entire lifespan from design to end of life. The framework considers inputs such as raw materials and produces net effects such as total environmental emissions. The technique can be used to assess products, services, projects, and also as a tool for comparison within these categories. The life cycle starts at design and materials sourcing, moves to transportation of resources to manufacturing facilities, onto manufacturing and distribution, then to the product’s use phase and maintenance involved with it, and finally to end of life, where it may be recycled.
The environmental impacts quantified at each step of the life cycle is determined by the engineer, planner, or analyzer. Impacts may be quantified in terms of greenhouse gas equivalents, criteria air pollutant quantities, ocean acidification potential, energy usage, and natural resource depletion, to name a few prominent metrics. These impacts are often shown in Environmental Product Declarations (EPDs) for products, and the LCA expert will combine many EPDs to produce results of an entire project. This tool for environmental analysis is systematic and quantitative, making it an excellent way to objectively compare products and systems because of its standardized procedure.
Additionally, LCA can expose counter-intuitive conclusions, sometimes allowing stakeholders to realize that some initiatives heralded as “environmentally friendly” are not as clearly beneficial as they may seem. For example, a comparative LCA of a gasoline-powered vehicle versus an electric vehicle may not necessarily yield intuitive results. The purpose of the vehicle (e.g. family vs. individual), predicted amount of travel, and end of life impacts are all components that vary the carbon footprint of the vehicle. In fact, the end of life recycling of an electric vehicle tends to produce far more carbon emissions than the same process would for a standard gasoline car. See more on this in this video.
However, this “all-encompassing” framework and assessment has its limitations. It is purely quantitative, does not account for non-environmental trends, and does not consider things that are qualitative in nature, such as happiness, equity, economic and financial concerns, etc. While a useful tool, LCA cannot be used on its own to make decisions for neighborhoods, cities, and countries. It can be dangerous to use the data by itself, promoting quantity over quality thinking that is a characteristic of white supremacy culture as observed by Tema Okun. It can, however, provide important context which planners can use to contribute to their ultimate understandings of how their decisions will impact communities.
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Digging Deeper: Applying LCA
One can take a variety of steps to further develop their understanding of community-level environmental effects. Examples of these steps include high-granularity geographical examinations of emission impacts, downstream effects of industrial manufacturing, and considerations of the breaching of land rights during the collection of natural resources.
Geographical Emission Impacts
Downstream Effects
Breaching of Land Rights
When examining the results of an LCA that declares substantial emissions from a project, it is important to think about where and for whom the stated impacts make the biggest change. For example, a given factory may release criteria air pollutants to only a certain area of the town, likely affecting an already marginalized neighborhood. Similar trends are seen time and time again across history, and also when studying the global contributors to climate change. Pulido mentions in “Racism and the Anthropocene” how Britain is the largest contributor per capita to rising global temperatures, and it is also geographically the least affected by the impacts of climate change. The environmental degradation caused by this predominantly white nation disproportionately affects the lives of less privileged regions such as those in the global south. When determining “who will pay the greatest cost, in terms of lives, livelihoods, and well-being, it is overwhelmingly…the ‘darker nations’“. Decisions made from ecological assessments like LCAs are currently being made without considering the “darker nations,” such as targeting a maximum increase of 2% in global temperatures, a percentage which essentially sentences island states and much of coastal Africa to death via the complete flooding of their communities (Pulido).
An LCA might alternatively provide data associated with natural resource depletion, underlining the responsibility of planners to consider the cultural contexts of where resources are being collected from. As recently as 2017, the United States seized the Indigenous tribe Iizhik Gwats’an’s sacred land for the purposes of drilling oil (as Million cited in “We are the land, and the land is us”). In this way, the environmental effects of using natural resources are tied with the destruction of sacred lands. Quoting Million again, “The stepped-up intensity of Indigenous-led resistance movements… should be understood as decision points, moments when we, as inhabitants, victims, and recipients of benefits wrought by the destruction of our own conditions for life on this planet, might do something different.” Resource and therefore energy usage parameters given by LCAs can be direct indicators of inequities like this, giving more crucial context to existing results.
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With these tools in mind, I leave you to ponder about your own environmental and sustainable footprint. What products do you frequently use, what physical systems are central to your daily life, and what environmental impacts might a full-scale LCA expose about those products and systems? Beyond their environmental effects, how might their sourcing, manufacturing, and end-of-life processes affect marginalized communities near you?
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Sources
Horvath, Arpad. CE268E Life-Cycle Assessment, Fall 2023, UC Berkeley.
“Life Cycle Analysis Comparison – Electric and Internal Combustion Engine Vehicles – Summary.” YouTube, YouTube, 20 Jan. 2022, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wurQQPXDNBQ.
Thesunshineisours. “What Is a Life Cycle Assessment? What the Different Parts of a Life Cycle Assessment?” ECOSYSTEMS UNITED, 22 June 2020, ecosystemsunited.com/2020/06/22/what-is-a-life-cycle-assessment-what-the-different-parts-of-a-life-cycle-assessment/.
Million, D. 2018. “We Are the Land and the Land Is Us”: Indigenous Land, Lives, and Embodied Ecologies in the Twenty-First Century. In Racial Ecologies
Okun, T. (1999). “White Supremacy Culture”. dRworks, wwwdismantlingracism.org.
Pulido, L. (2018). Racism and the Anthropocene. Future remains: A cabinet of curiosities for the Anthropocene, 116-128.
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