Konferenzbeitrag
Benefits of the implementation of reminder flows in LCA – illustration with energy flows
Vorschaubild nicht verfügbar
Volltext URI
Dokumententyp
Text/Conference Paper
Zusatzinformation
Datum
2013
Autor:innen
Zeitschriftentitel
ISSN der Zeitschrift
Bandtitel
Verlag
Shaker Verlag
Zusammenfassung
The large number of today s environmental declaration programs spreads complexity in the landscape of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) practices. The type III environmental declaration programs often require the calculation of specific reminder flows in addition to the Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) results. This is not a frequently addressed topic in the LCA literature since presenting results on reminder flows is often considered as a simplified LCA. However, reminder flows appear to display more readily understandable information for a non-expert, which was a forceful argument for a better communication and comprehension of LCA results. The objective of this paper is to present the benefit of the implementation of reminder flows in terms of LCA results.
A presentation of these reminder flows is given, in the context of environmental communication. To better comprehend those reminder flows, the entry data required to compute them were inventoried. A gap analysis was also performed to highlight missing data and methods for the calculation of these flows. We focused on the calculation of the energy flows recommended by the EN15804 standard. The complexity of the interactions between the reminder flows is emphasized by the fact that they are not based on the same type of input data. We showed that the International recommendations regarding the LCI data set format do not provide the essential background for the calculation of reminder flows. That s why two solutions were proposed: a classification of the analysed systems into families to facilitate the manual addition of the missing data; the creation of an algorithm in the LCA software to calculate the reminder flows automatically along with the LCIA results.