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Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)
Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a method for quantifying the material and energy flows associated with the life cycle of a product or service, and assessing its potential environmental impacts (Jolliet et al. 2016). It works by identifying the activities associated with this product or service over its entire life cycle, “from cradle to grave” (Figure 1).It is a multi-criteria approach that is standardized internationally, with the NF EN ISO 14040 standard, and through the Lifecycle Initiative (UN 2022) as part of the UN's environmental programs. LCA enables the impact of a product/process to be assessed at different stages of production, manufacture and use.
The LCA methodology follows several steps (figure 2) allowing to state the goal of the study, describing the involved processes, collect the data and calculate the impacts along diverse impact categories. The method follows the ISO 14040 and 14044 standards.
Goal & Scope:
Definition of the objectives and boundaries of the system under study
Life cycle inventory:
inventory of from and to the ecosphere for a system – it involves quantitative data collection on the processes under study
Impact assessment:
this phase aim at evaluating the potential environmental and human health impacts resulting from the flows identified for the system under study
Interpretation:
identifies, quantifies, checks, and evaluate information from the results of the life cycle impact assessment. The outcome of the interpretation phase is a set of conclusions and recommendations for the study.
Comparative assessment:
As part of the CODECS project, the aim is to compare the environmental impact of the farming system before and after the use of digital technologies, in order to capture the effect of the installation and use of digital technology.To do this, we are using two scenarios, one before, which represents the situation of our reference process before the technology was installed, and one after, which represents the digitalised process.
