Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Communicating with the media:
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Press releases;
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Press conferences.
Communicating with institutional stakeholders:
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Interactions with experts representing various institutional stakeholders;
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Stakeholder hearings;
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Round tables;
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Mediation.
5 LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT
B. Sára
5.1 Concept of LCA
LCA is an environmental management tool. Its main characteristic is the extension
of decision makers' approach with regard to environmental concerns: not only does
LCA deal with direct emissions and waste of an industrial activity but it also includes
the assessment of indirect environmental impacts related to material and energy pro-
duction in the supply chain, transport and distribution processes, use and end of life
management of products. The concept is called “life cycle thinking'' or “from cradle
to grave'' approach and is applied for goods, services and technologies. This approach
helps to obtain a holistic idea about environmental problems related to a certain activity
and to avoid “problem shifting'' from one life cycle phase to another.
Each step of a “life cycle'' is a process that consumes energy, materials and dis-
charges emissions into the environment. These consumptions and emissions have
potential environmental impacts that can be global (such as the impact of greenhouse
gases), regional or local (e.g. the toxicity of heavy metals). LCA enables quantifying
these environmental impacts considering the use of resources (minerals, water, energy
sources, etc.), ecological consequences (global warming, eutrophication, acidification,
etc.) and human health (toxicity, photo-smog, etc.).
LCA is an applied methodology and it is used to reach corporate and gov-
ernmental goals. These goals may include identification of environmental priorities
among the existing alternatives (materials, suppliers, technologies, etc.), defini-
tion of environmentally conscious strategies or strengthening the environmental
communication.
5.2 Methods and tools
LCA starts with goal and scope definition followed by data collection and inventory
analysis of resource consumption and emissions through the whole life cycle. Impact
assessment methods are applied to classify and characterize resources and emissions of
this inventory to obtain quantitative indicators about potential environmental impacts.
Normalization and weighting methods make it possible to calculate an aggregated indi-
cator that describes environmental performance. As a last step of LCA, the results of
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