Given that a significant percentage of a product’s impacts are defined during design and development, there is a need to effectively integrate Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) into these early phases. However, the lack of standardized practices, the lack of appropriate modeling approaches, data issues, special training requirements for designers, and uncertainties in the results make it difficult to apply LCA in these early stages. In order to address this gap, this work builds on previous research that integrated system engineering and functional analysis into LCA to develop an object-oriented framework for LCA. The framework is applied to a consumer product and the results of the approach demonstrate the potential for an easy to update and scalable LCA model that facilitates comparability. Each module in this model can be developed separately and integrated effectively into a larger model guided by functional analysis techniques. This framework holds the promise to better integrate LCA into the design and development phases.
Implementation of an Object-Oriented Life Cycle Assessment Framework Using Functional Analysis and Systems Engineering Principles
