Tools for environment's web application for Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)

LCA is becoming more and more important over the la st few years. In France, the application of law sai d Grenelle II in 2010 set, amongst others, the obligation for all distributors to display the environmental performa nce of all ‘business to consumer’ products which can be communicate d by environmental labelling. This requirement come s directly from the Ecodesign directive and its application leans on the LCA method. The French movement is a precursory of ecolabel which is now being developed at Europea n l vel. The downside of the widespread use of LCA could be a lack of human and financial resources. Actually, LC A needs well educated people with good experience w orking on highly capable but complex software. One way to resolve the increasing demand on LCA is to make it achievable by non-experts working on unc omplicated software. The benefit of this way is to increase the number of people who can model a product or a service and calculate its environmental impacts. A solution to get LCA achievable by non-experts is a tool which c ombines quality and the simplicity. This tool is a tailor-m ade software for specific application field. It lea ns on three mainstays : a Product Category Rules (PCR), a sector sp ecific database and a calculator implemented in a w eb application. This method guaranties the quality and repres entativeness of the LCA even performed by an inexpe rienced user. The web application gives a holistic environmental view of the product or service, the detail of the e nvironmental impact by process and can be used to compare severa l sc narios. Since the end of April, the web applic ation also integrates uncertainty analysis. 1. The development of LCA The idea of an assessment of impacts alongside the life cycle of a product began during the 70's after the energy crisis of 1972. These ass ssments were mainly based on energy consumption (Jolliet et al. 2005) . Since the 70's, th e LCA sector has been widely developed and integrated many new aspect ,but this development is n ot linear and we can see an acceleration in the development of everything that flanks the LCA, like methods, databases, models. Since the publication of the ISO norm between 1997 and 2000 ( ISO 14040:1997; ISO 14041:1998; ISO 14042: 2000; ISO 14043:2000), a lot of new producti on and updates have been made, like for the norms, the update of the ISO norm in 2006(ISO 14040 :2006; ISO 14044:2006), the publication of the ILCD handbook in 2010 (ILCD 2010), the developm ent of the database Ecoinvent in 2003 (Ecoinvent), its update in 2009 for the version 2 a nd in May 2011 for the third version. The methods have also been developed, like Impact 2002+ (Jolliet 2003), which is being updated now, TRACI (TRACI), (already third version) and the d velopment of USEtox (USEtox), to implement the last knowledge about human toxicity and freshwater ecotoxicity. The development of the LCA is pushed, on the one ha nd, by the research which improves the knowledge of some aspects, like the aquatic tox ici y. On the other hand, the LCA is used 1 Tools for Environment, http://tools.cycleco.eu/, m arion.sie@cycleco.eu 2 Cycleco, www.cycleco.eu, jobin.tools@yahoo.fr EnviroInfo 2011: Innovations in Sharing Environmental Observations and Information Copyright 2011 Shaker Verlag Aachen, ISBN: 978-3-8440-0451-9