title: Recent developments in Life Cycle Assessment.
abstract: Life Cycle Assessment is a tool to assess the environmental impacts and resources used throughout a product's life cycle, i.e., from raw material acquisition, via production and use phases, to waste management. The methodological development in LCA has been strong, and LCA is broadly applied in practice. The aim of this paper is to provide a review of recent developments of LCA methods. The focus is on some areas where there has been an intense methodological development during the last years. We also highlight some of the emerging issues. In relation to the Goal and Scope definition we especially discuss the distinction between attributional and consequential LCA. For the Inventory Analysis, this distinction is relevant when discussing system boundaries, data collection, and allocation. Also highlighted are developments concerning databases and Input-Output and hybrid LCA. In the sections on Life Cycle Impact Assessment we discuss the characteristics of the modelling as well as some recent developments for specific impact categories and weighting. In relation to the Interpretation the focus is on uncertainty analysis. Finally, we discuss recent developments in relation to some of the strengths and weaknesses of LCA.
authors.affiliation: Division of Environmental Strategies Research - fms, Department of Urban Planning and Environment, School of Architecture and the Built Environment, Royal Institute of Technology (KTH), SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden. goran.finnveden@infra.kth.se
authors.forename: Göran
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Finnveden
authors.forename: Michael Z
authors.initials: MZ
authors.lastname: Hauschild
authors.forename: Tomas
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Ekvall
authors.forename: Jeroen
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Guinée
authors.forename: Reinout
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Heijungs
authors.forename: Stefanie
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Hellweg
authors.forename: Annette
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Koehler
authors.forename: David
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Pennington
authors.forename: Sangwon
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Suh
mesh_terms: D003628:Database Management Systems; D004777:Environment