ABSTRACT
The ever-increasing need for responses from governments, global companies, and individuals to reduce their potential environmental impacts has motivated and contributed to the development and improvement of already existing methods for quantifying resource use and emissions and calculating different related environmental impacts. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is one of the most widely used tools in this regard (Stewart and Weidema 2006; Finnveden et al. 2009; Guinée et al. 2002; ISO 2006a; Sonnemann et al. 2003) and is described in detail in Chapter 10. LCA is a systematic tool for the evaluation of the environ ‐ mental impacts of a product system, taking into account all the processes in its life cycle from the extraction of raw materials, manufacturing process, produc ‐ tion, and use to end-of-life treatments (ISO 2006a, 2006b). The environmental impacts of a product system can be modelled by using either the process-based LCA approach or economic input-output LCA (EIO-LCA), based on environ ‐ mentally extended input-output (EEIO) analysis (Hendrickson et al. 2006), or a combination of both approaches, which is referred to as hybrid IOLCA (Suh and Huppes 2005). Despite the fact that there is variation in modelling among the different methods introduced, they are all based on a life cycle approach, quantify resource use and emissions and calculate environmental impacts.
