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Sustainable Business Solutions
Life Cycle Assessment
This technique is used for the investigation and valuation of the environmental impacts of a given product or process. The network below shows the environmental impacts of separate stages in the production process and their “weight”, i.e. the relative damage each stage is contributing to the overall impacts are calculated.
Life cycle assessments can be used to:
- compare processes to identify greener technologies
- identify “hot spots” in processes with the highest relative environmental burden
- quantitatively determine the benefits of using recycled materials over virgin material
- compare process and products for their effect on separate impact categories such as climate change and depletion of resources