Lifecycle Assessment (1)

After a long absence from our blog, we are back with this little piece on lifecycle assessment that Nadisha Prelis, a good friend of the Banksia Eco Warriors project, has prepared for us. I am trying to engage a few regular contributors to make sure we post something every week. If you are interested in posting on this blog, please let me know!

With so much being said about climate change you, like millions of people out there, may want to help make a positive change. One way of doing this is through the choices you make as a consumer. Let’s assume you are already committed to doing your best to make sure your environmental impact on the planet is as small as it can be. As part of that commitment you may have made many choices as a consumer. For example perhaps you weighed the environmental impacts of choosing:

- A laptop versus a desktop computer.

- A gas boosted solar hot water system versus a normal gas hot water system to replace an existing electric one.

- Cloth nappies versus disposable nappies.

- A hybrid car versus an ordinary, energy efficient car.

- A compact fluorescent light versus an incandescent light.

On the face of it, the environmentally responsible choice would be simple. Of course a compact fluorescent light is going to be better for the environment! Well is it? Did you know that Compact Fluorescent Lamps contain small amounts of mercury that can contribute to air and water pollution if released in landfills and waste incinerators? Does it start to get tricky? If we look at a product in the context of its entire life, how can we know for sure whether those “green” products are as green as we think? It would seem that there are other less obvious or immediate impacts that need to be considered than those that happen when we use a product.

Let’s look at a quick example. There has been a lot of talk about hybrid cars. Of course, they are less polluting and therefore a far better transportation choice. Buts lets take our beautiful hybrid car out of its usual where its drives proudly, if not a bit smugly by a gas guzzling four wheel drive. What about how it was made and what it took to make it? What happens after it goes to the scrap heap? Can these upstream and downstream stages of the car’s life produce more emissions than what we will be saving over its useful life? Now it gets pretty complicated doesn’t it?

This is where Lifecycle Assessment (LCA) comes in handy. Lifecycle assessment is a way of considering the environmental impacts throughout the entire life of a product. This means looking at a range of impacts when raw materials are extracted, when the product is manufactured, transported to markets, used , re-used, recycled, and disposed of. It may sound like a lot of work, and indeed it is, but this whole of life approach allows a holistic and therefore fairer assessment of the true environmental impact of a product.

But how is this done? What I suggest is that we stop here for now and that in the next entry we try to see what would be involved in comparing two alternatives using lifecycle assessment. For me one the less obvious choices would be between cloth and disposable nappies, so we might give that a try!