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Greetings!
We hear you will be attending the LCA IX conference in Boston next week, and we are looking forward to getting to spend some time with you. Please come by our table during the breaks and say hello.
We also have some very interesting presentations this year, which we hope you will sit in on. See the details below. |
Achieving Comprehensive Social Impact Assessment
Mellisa Hamilton & Lise Laurin
Wednesday 3:30-5:30 SOCIAL LCA
Just as environmental impact assessments miss important environmental affects and are often augmented by a risk assessment, the inclusion of social impacts in an assessment method will miss important social impacts. Because social impact assessment is a relatively new concept, there will be a learning curve over which the methods will get better and more comprehensive. In addition, social impacts are less tangible than environmental impacts, and may never be as well modeled using a life cycle assessment approach. These impacts can also be assessed using a risk assessment, this time an assessment of social risk. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is often criticized for missing major environmental impacts. As an example, brominated flame retardants, even those which are no longer manufactured due to the possibility of risk to human health, are ignored by all major impact assessment methods. The risks to fish migrations in hydroelectric power generation are also ignored. To ensure that these important environmental impacts are not ignored in major decision-making, most LCA practitioners recommend a complimentary risk assessment to capture these other impacts. Social LCA has even more potential for missing impacts. Cultural biases mean that one society's benefit is another's bane. We have seen, however, that social risk assessment as applied using Total Cost Assessment (TCA) has done an excellent job at digging out the potential social impacts of a behavior or decision. Applying TCA to several projects, social concerns have come to the forefront: concerns over noise, immediate human health impacts, disease transmittal from one location to another, and local employment, for example. While TCA is only one example of a social risk assessment, we will show how this method has brought the issue of social sustainability side by side with economic and environmental sustainability. By including this type of assessment as a compliment to the LCA methodology at the outset, we simplify the initial task for Social Impact Assessment Method developers and give them a greater chance of success. |
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Five recycling models and how they drive the market behavior. Are they moving us to sustainability?
Laurel McEwen & Lise Laurin
Wednesday 3:30-5:30 RECYCLING
Modeling reuse and recycling is not easy and yet is critical for many industrial LCA's. As companies work towards making more sustainable decisions, they are specifying recycled and recyclable materials in their designs and developing end of life plans to reclaim materials for recycling. Industry wants credit for these efforts in their LCA models. The credit may or may not be applied, however, depending on the value choices inherent in the recycling model chosen, and the credit may or may not be appropriate depending on the material market. For example, attaching no burden to the use of recycled material, as in the cut-off method, may be appropriate for seldom recycled materials such as carpet where the demand is diverting waste, whereas for steel, where nearly all material returned for recycling is reused your demand is more likely driving virgin production. Understanding these value choices is critical to choosing which method you select. This paper will diagram the value choices inherent in several common recycling models (avoided burden, cut-off, economic, market model for system expansion), and ask the question, "What behavior is the method driving?" Industry can use this understanding to select a recycling method that drives sensible behavior in their market..
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Using LCA to measure sustainability
Lise Laurin & Laurel McEwen
Thursday 8:30- 10:00 LCM & POLICY 1
LCA has the unique distinction of being the only scientifically-based, comprehensive method to measure "green." While LCA should be augmented with environmental risk assessment and some measure of social assessment, it can be the cornerstone of a company's sustainability assessment. But what is sustainability? If our definition is something like the Report of the World Commission on Environment and Development: "Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." it becomes clear that no company or product in today's environment is sustainable, except perhaps a few subsistence farmers in remote corners of the world. We are on a journey to sustainability, we're not there yet. How do we assess products to get from here to there most quickly? Early studies of photovoltaic panel manufacture showed that panels would have to work at peak efficiency for as much as 6 years to create as much energy as was used to make the panels in the first place. (Corkish, 1997). Did this heavy upfront energy investment mean that we should have abandoned research in this area? Studies of reusable drinking cups show that the hot water used for washing brings the impacts of these cups close to single use cups (OVAM, 2006). Does this indicate that we should continue work to make the single use cups even less impactful, or is there another alternative? This presentation will explore several scenarios through possible future paths of development with the aim to broaden the discussion of the path to sustainability and the care needed to be sure we don't abandon the most viable paths before their true potential can be understood..
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