Rebitzer G, Ekvall T, Frischknecht R, Hunkeler D, Norris G, Rydberg T, Schmidt W-P, Suh S, Weidema B P, Pennington D W
Life Cycle Systems Group, GECOS, ENAC, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology-Lausanne (EPFL), CH-1015 Lausanne, Switzerland. Gerald.
Environ Int. 2004 Jul;30(5):701-20. doi: 10.1016/j.envint.2003.11.005.
Sustainable development requires methods and tools to measure and compare the environmental impacts of human activities for the provision of goods and services (both of which are summarized under the term "products"). Environmental impacts include those from emissions into the environment and through the consumption of resources, as well as other interventions (e.g., land use) associated with providing products that occur when extracting resources, producing materials, manufacturing the products, during consumption/use, and at the products' end-of-life (collection/sorting, reuse, recycling, waste disposal). These emissions and consumptions contribute to a wide range of impacts, such as climate change, stratospheric ozone depletion, tropospheric ozone (smog) creation, eutrophication, acidification, toxicological stress on human health and ecosystems, the depletion of resources, water use, land use, and noise-among others. A clear need, therefore, exists to be proactive and to provide complimentary insights, apart from current regulatory practices, to help reduce such impacts. Practitioners and researchers from many domains come together in life cycle assessment (LCA) to calculate indicators of the aforementioned potential environmental impacts that are linked to products-supporting the identification of opportunities for pollution prevention and reductions in resource consumption while taking the entire product life cycle into consideration. This paper, part 1 in a series of two, introduces the LCA framework and procedure, outlines how to define and model a product's life cycle, and provides an overview of available methods and tools for tabulating and compiling associated emissions and resource consumption data in a life cycle inventory (LCI). It also discusses the application of LCA in industry and policy making. The second paper, by Pennington et al. (Environ. Int. 2003, in press), highlights the key features, summarises available approaches, and outlines the key challenges of assessing the aforementioned inventory data in terms of contributions to environmental impacts (life cycle impact assessment, LCIA).
可持续发展需要方法和工具来衡量和比较人类活动在提供商品和服务（这两者在“产品”一词下进行了概括）时对环境的影响。环境影响包括向环境排放以及通过资源消耗产生的影响，以及与提供产品相关的其他干预措施（例如土地利用），这些干预措施发生在资源开采、材料生产、产品制造、消费/使用过程以及产品寿命结束时（收集/分类、再利用、回收、废物处理）。这些排放和消耗会导致广泛的影响，例如气候变化、平流层臭氧消耗、对流层臭氧（烟雾）形成、富营养化、酸化、对人类健康和生态系统的毒理学压力、资源枯竭、用水、土地利用以及噪音等。因此，除了当前的监管措施外，显然还需要积极主动地提供补充性见解，以帮助减少此类影响。来自许多领域的从业者和研究人员共同参与生命周期评估（LCA），以计算与产品相关的上述潜在环境影响指标，从而在考虑产品整个生命周期的同时，支持识别污染预防和资源消耗减少的机会。本文是系列两篇文章中的第1篇，介绍了LCA框架和程序，概述了如何定义和建模产品的生命周期，并提供了在生命周期清单（LCI）中制表和汇编相关排放及资源消耗数据的可用方法和工具的概述。它还讨论了LCA在工业和政策制定中的应用。Pennington等人撰写的第二篇文章（《环境国际》，2003年，即将发表）突出了关键特征，总结了可用方法，并概述了在评估上述清单数据对环境影响的贡献方面（生命周期影响评估，LCIA）的关键挑战。
