The application of Life Cycle Assessment to process selection, design and operation

Although Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been developed primarily as a tool for product development and comparison, it has much wider scope. This paper addresses the application of LCA to the selection, design and optimisation of process operations, with examples from the chemical, water and mining sectors. Of particular interest is the problem of reconciling incommensurable environmental impacts - known as the "valuation" problem - in LCA. For optimisation problems, rather than attempting to reduce impacts to a single metric constituting the objective function, the non-inferior (or "Pareto") surface can be used to define the space within which optimal solutions lie, and thus to provide the basis for implementing environmental improvements in process design and operation.