Environmental Engineering Reference
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and private sector development initiatives. Life cycle thinking adopts the complete
process of a product
s life cycle from raw material extraction from the earth,
planning, designing, processing, making parts,
'
finished products, their usage and
their disposal. In the process it not only takes into account the natural, social and
economic resources that are being used in its production but also the impacts,
positive and negative, the production process would cause to these resources. Thus,
LCCA has the potential to achieve the objectives of nexus and green economy.
Although this is not done often due to complex methodologies involved, the
adoption of environmental economics methodologies has facilitated comprehensive
LCA (i.e., adoption of consequential LCA against attributional LCA) (Finnveden
et al. 2009 ).
Recent studies have shown that different crop systems can be evaluated and
compared in terms of water use, energy use and emissions using LCCA. In a study
of four different rice production technologies (intensive flooded high yielding
varieties (HYV), rain-fed rice, systems of rice intensi
cation (SRI) and organic rice)
were compared for water, energy and GHG emissions (Gathorne-Hardy 2013b ).
SRI scored high when compared to other rice systems in terms of water, energy and
emissions per kilogram of rice produced under the condition of low manure
application. While SRI is an environmentally friendly method with less water and
fertilizer requirements, the environmental bene
ts might get upset if excess manure
(organic fertilizer) is applied. Similarly, a comparative assessment of biofuel and
fossil fuel production systems using LCA has estimated that biofuel production has
the largest estimated reduction of GHG when compared to fossil fuels (Davis et al.
2008 ).
2.2 Asset Management and Sustainable Services
Another dimension of the LCA that is less explored is its potential to ensure
sustainable service delivery. The use of LCCA throughout the life cycle of an asset
or assets appears restricted and undeveloped. For, LCCA is viewed as not neces-
sarily a good budget tool (Barringer and Weber 1996 ). Lack of full-blown analysis
covering all the phases of the life of an asset could be one reason, though life cycle
costing in theory includes all costs at various stages of the life cycle. The adoption
of LCCA ought to be broader throughout the economic life of the asset. In fact,
LCCA is being used for economic benchmarking of assets (Boussabaine and
Kirkham 2004 as quoted in AAMCoG 2008 ). The process helps in monitoring the
economic performance of the asset in comparison with expectations set at the
beginning of the project.
Such a process helps in maintaining the life of the asset and even extending
the lifespan of the systems. This helps in maintaining certain level of performance
(i.e., checking the slippage in services and maintaining sustainability of services).
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