Life Cycle Assessment, an analytical tool for designing environmentally sound electric and electronic devices

In Europe, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has proven to belong to that category of tools providing quantitative objective and scientific analysis on some environmental impacts of industrial systems. The reason for this is that an LCA is a detailed and quantitative balance-sheet of energetics and material inputs and outputs of a carefully defined system describing a product, an activity, or a set of processes. In the case of a product Life Cycle Assessment, the system encompasses the entire “life cycle” of the product, from raw material extraction to the different end of life management alternatives (landfilling, incineration, recycling, reusing, etc.), including the manufacturing stages, transportation, distribution, use and waste collection. One of the most important applications of LCAs is that it highlights this pollution displacement which then in turn can be better managed and controlled. By providing an unbiased analysis of entire industrial systems, LCA has shown that the reality behind widely held beliefs regarding “green” issues such as reusable vs. one way products, recycling vs. incineration, “natural” vs. synthetic products were far more complex than expected and not as “green” as assumed