Life Cycle Assessment

The life cycle assessment (LCA) is a gate-to-gate evaluation of the environmental impact associated with a given product. It offers a holistic view of environmental costs to cover the entire activities related to the product. This ranges from the extraction of raw materials, the production and distribution to points of consumption and the final disposal of the product.

This methodology is regarded as a common decision-support tool for both policymakers and industry experts in assessing the impacts of a product or process. A combination of energy consumption and GHG emissions analysis with the comparison of life cycle performance of production is conducive to the study of energy-saving and emissions reduction.

In the ARENHA project, up-to-date environmental LCA methodologies will be used to understand and quantify the life cycle environmental performance of the technologies and process chains developed in the project. This assessment will be used to guide the development of the novel concept through key environmental performance indicators and to inform future stakeholders on the performances in order to support their decisions.