Center for Sustainable Systems, School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan , 440 Church Street, Ann Arbor, Michigan 48109, United States.
Environ Sci Technol. 2015 Mar 3;49(5):3067-75. doi: 10.1021/es505217a. Epub 2015 Feb 16.
Emerging products and technologies pose unique challenges for the life cycle assessment (LCA) community, given the lack of data and inherent uncertainties regarding their development. An emerging technology that has the potential to be transformative and effect broad-scale change within society, as well as the underpinning assumptions associated with its life cycle, is particularly difficult to analyze. Despite the associated challenges, LCA methods must be developed for transformative technologies. The greatest improvement potential occurs at the early phases of technology development; therefore, prospective LCA results can be used to anticipate potential unintended consequences and develop design pathways that lead to preferential outcomes. This paper identifies and categorizes ten factors that influence the LCA results of transformative technologies in order to provide a formal structure for determining appropriate factors for inclusion within an LCA. Appropriate factors for an analysis should be selected according to the overall research questions of the study and are applicable to both attributional and consequential approaches to LCA.
新兴产品和技术给生命周期评估（LCA）领域带来了独特的挑战，因为它们的开发缺乏数据且存在固有不确定性。一种具有变革潜力并能够在社会中产生广泛影响的新兴技术，以及与其生命周期相关的基本假设，特别难以分析。尽管存在相关挑战，但必须为变革性技术开发 LCA 方法。最大的改进潜力出现在技术开发的早期阶段；因此，可以使用前瞻性 LCA 结果来预测潜在的意外后果，并开发导致有利结果的设计途径。本文确定并分类了影响变革性技术 LCA 结果的十个因素，以便为确定 LCA 中包含的适当因素提供正式结构。分析的适当因素应根据研究的总体研究问题选择，并且适用于归因和后果方法的 LCA。
