Life cycle assessments

• Life cycle assessments

  Carried out to assess the environmental impacts of products
• 4 stages of LCA

  Extracting and processing raw materials, manufacturing & packaging, use & operation during its lifetime, disposal at the end of its useful life
• Objective

  Energy, water resource consumption and production of some wastes can be fairly and easily quantified
• Subjective

  Allocating a value to pollutant effects are less straightforward and require judgements
• Selected or abbreviated

  LCAs can be devised to evaluate a product, but these can be misused to reach pre-determined outcomes
• What does reducing the used, reusing and recycling do?

  Reduce the use of limited resources, energy consumption, waste and environmental impacts
• Ways of reducing the use of resources

  .Reducing the use, reuse and recycling of a material

  .Metals, glass, building materials, clay ceramics and plastics are produced from limited raw materials

  .Obtaining raw materials from the earth by quarrying and mining cause major environmental impacts
• Where does most of the energy used from these processes come from?

  limited resources
• Reusing - Some products such as glass can be reused
• Recycling

  -glass can be crushed and melted into different glass products 

  -Metals can be melted and recast or reformed into different products 

  -The amount of separation required for recycling depends on the material and properties