Currently, LCA customers select LCA software based on service (maintenance and training), functionality and database content. Customers also consider specific factors related to the use of the software for similar purposes and LCA studies, the reference users, the principal assets of the software and an estimation of the license cost.
Based on a survey of LCA customers conducted by the Journal of Industrial Ecology in 2006, most life cycle assessments are implemented with dedicated software packages. Currently, most LCA tools provide a general calculation of a product’s environmental and economic impact and include several features to refine a user’s assessment. These tools produce a side-by-side comparison of products based on environmental measures considering their raw materials and energy source. Such comparisons can assist in designing products, meeting environmental regulations and increasing efficiencies in the supply chain. These software packages range in price from free to over $20,000, depending on functionality, number of databases, number of users and features.
While current LCA software has been helpful in laying some groundwork for LCA and product decisions, there are still a number of features that need improvement. One of the most popular tools only allows for comparisons of product alternatives, but does not allow users to consider upstream design alternatives. As a result, limited raw material inputs hinder the ability of a user to clearly define new products. This can lead to limitations in the LCA results, decreased effectiveness in sustainable project design and missed opportunities for alternative design decision-making. Legacy LCA (LLCA) tools are further limited in the following ways (click any topic to open):
They are static and can’t provide temporal analysis.
Governmental policies and manufacturing processes may change over the lifetime of the factory and even the product. These changes require data sets to be frequently updated.
The boundaries tend to be limited
Determining how far downstream and/or upstream businesses can go in creating their LCA creates inconsistencies between businesses that produce competing products. The results of LCA can change dramatically depending on what is included or excluded in the analysis. Current LCA tools, for example, do not include employee activities in calculating corporate footprints, although this potential is available to users of the software AEA has been working on with Sandia.
Their geographical specificity is coarse
LLCAs are most commonly limited to country data, rather than of states or counties. The outcomes of LCAs done on a finer grain is much more precise and revealing.
Most fail to incorporate nonlinear aspects of the manufacturing process.
Current LCA is limited in the “mass in=mass out” paradigm, not accounting for many external factors that effect a product’s sustainability. Nonlinear relationships, for example, include the infrastructure built for the product in addition to the raw materials. By incorporating more consequential LCA, users can incorporate the consequence of using various products to generate a more comprehensive and accurate analysis. Additionally, current LCA software cannot account for economies of scale that can increase the number of products being manufactured and the supply chain. In contrast, our new LCA software will allow users to see positive feedback loops in supply, demand and increased consumption of resources. These trends can trigger governmental regulation that can then be plugged back into the LCA model for a real-time, interactive analysis.
The data provenance is not rigorous and data sets cannot easily be compared.
Users are not easily able to trace an object back to where it came from and cannot answer questions like: Who is downstream/upstream of the client? What are the direct outputs? What is the impact/characterization file? Who created the database being used and how are updates managed?
Their ability to conduct comparative (consequential) studies is limited.
Current LCA methods generate a list of disparate impact categories that are difficult to compare objectively, such as the impact of a certain amount of a greenhouse gas (GHG) versus an increase in risk to waterways from a mildly eco-toxic material. Comparing these two outputs requires subjective value judgments on the part of the user that can skew results and increase the potential for misinterpretation. Our LCA tool provides a comprehensive analysis for a product incorporating many such impact factors, rather than a blind comparison of one or two.
Optimization of LLCA tends to be manual rather than automated
The selection of a best element from some set of available alternatives is most accurately and effectively done through an automated process, as in a user trying to minimize the amount of carbon they are generating. Even the most reliable LCA tools rely heavily on human expertise, which can be subjective as mentioned previously, and have a high economic cost and human resource requirement.