Economics of life cycle assessment: Inefficiency of the present approach

✍ Scribed by Stefan Schaltegger

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 77 KB
• Volume: 6
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0964-4733
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-0836(199702)6:1<1::aid-bse84>3.0.co;2-d

✦ Synopsis

From an economic perspective, tools of environmental management must be ecoefficient, i.e. they have to be economically efficient and they must lead to ecologically sound decisions. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is regarded as one of the most important environmental management tools today. It attempts to record and assess all the environmental impacts of the whole life cycle of a product. The potential benefits of LCA have been discussed extensively. However, the costs and the effects actually achieved have been vastly neglected. Economic analysis shows that the present approach of LCA is economically inefficient compared with site-specific environmental management, and that it is likely to result in ecologically wrong decisions.

EFFICIENCY OF ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT TOOLS

Economic rational management is characterized by being efficient, as the purpose of economic behaviour is to manage scarcity in the best possible manner. In general, efficiency measures the relation between output and input. The higher the output