title: Assessing relationships among life-cycle environmental impacts with dimension reduction techniques.
abstract: Nowadays, there is a trend in many countries towards more environmentally benign products and processes. Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a quantitative analysis tool developed and utilized for the evaluation of environmental impacts occurring throughout the entire life-cycle of a product, process or activity. LCA requires a large amount of data in its different phases and can also generate large amounts of results which may be hard to interpret. In order to uncover and visualize the structure of large multidimensional data sets, Multivariate Analysis techniques can help. Hence, in this paper, a methodology using Principal Component Analysis and Multi-Dimensional Scaling is proposed and illustrated by means of two case studies. The first case study evaluates the operation of several wastewater treatment plants. The second case study deals with the environmental evaluation of the cultivation, processing and consumption of mussels. In both case studies, the redundancy present in the data allowed a dimensionality reduction from seven and ten to two dimensions, with a small loss of information. Plotting the environmental impact data in these two dimensions can help visualize, interpret and communicate them.
authors.affiliation: Department of Industrial Management. University of Seville, Camino de los Descubrimientos s/n, 41092 Sevilla, Spain. egm@esi.us.es
authors.forename: Ester
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Gutiérrez
authors.forename: Sebastián
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Lozano
authors.forename: M Teresa
authors.initials: MT
authors.lastname: Moreira
authors.forename: Gumersindo
authors.initials: G
authors.lastname: Feijoo
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D017756:Aquaculture; D049872:Bivalvia; D004777:Environment; D004784:Environmental Monitoring / Q000379:methods*; D025341:Principal Component Analysis; D014865:Waste Disposal, Fluid