Life Cycle Assessment: Theory and Practice
About this book
Life Cycle Assessment: Theory and Practice, edited by Michael Z. Hauschild, Ralph K. Rosenbaum, and Stig Irving Olsen and published by Springer in 2018, is the most comprehensive single-volume treatment of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology available for students, practitioners, and researchers.
The book emerged from the collective expertise of a broad international contributor community and reflects the maturation of LCA as both a scientific discipline and a policy-relevant decision-support tool in the decades since the method's systematic codification in the 1990s. LCA is a systematic analytical framework for evaluating the environmental impacts associated with a product, process, or service across its entire life cycle — from raw material extraction and processing, through manufacturing, distribution, use, and maintenance, to end-of-life treatment and disposal or recycling. The approach is distinctive in its ambition to capture environmental burdens comprehensively across all life cycle stages, preventing the problem-shifting that occurs when interventions reduce impacts in one stage while inadvertently increasing them in another.
Hauschild, Rosenbaum, and Olsen situate LCA within the broader context of sustainability science, life cycle thinking, and the transition toward circular economy models in which resource flows are designed to loop rather than terminate in waste streams. The book's structure mirrors the four-phase framework standardised by ISO 14040 and ISO 14044, the international standards that govern LCA practice. The first phase — goal and scope definition — establishes the purpose of the study, its intended audience, the functional unit that serves as the reference basis for all comparisons, the system boundaries that determine which processes are included or excluded, and the assumptions and quality criteria that will guide data collection.
The functional unit is a critical methodological choice: it defines what the product system does and at what scale, making meaningful comparisons possible between alternatives that may be physically quite different but serve the same function. The second phase — Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) analysis — is the data-intensive core of LCA. It involves mapping all the material and energy flows entering and leaving the product system across its defined system boundary: the resources extracted from the environment (energy, water, minerals, land), the intermediate products and services consumed, and the emissions and waste streams released to air, water, and soil.
The book provides extensive guidance on data collection strategies, database selection, and the treatment of multifunctional processes — situations where a single industrial process generates multiple useful outputs and an allocation method must be chosen to apportion environmental burdens between them. Major LCI databases such as ecoinvent are discussed in detail, along with the methodological choices involved in building or adapting background datasets for specific study contexts. The third phase — Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) — translates the inventory of elementary flows into scores across a set of environmental impact categories that are meaningful for human health and ecosystem protection.
The characterisation step uses impact characterisation factors — quantitative models of the causal relationship between an emission or resource use and an environmental damage — to convert inventory flows into impact category indicator results. Common midpoint impact categories include climate change (measured in CO2 equivalents), ozone depletion, human toxicity, freshwater and marine eutrophication, land use, water scarcity, and fossil resource depletion, among others. The book gives detailed treatment to endpoint or damage-oriented LCIA methods that aggregate midpoint impacts into three higher-level areas of protection: human health, ecosystem quality, and resource availability.
Hauschild and Rosenbaum are both prominent contributors to the development of LCIA characterisation methodology, and the book reflects deep engagement with the scientific challenges of quantifying environmental cause-effect chains — particularly for toxicological impacts, where fate, exposure, and effect modelling must be integrated across complex environmental pathways. The ILCD (International Life Cycle Data System) Handbook, developed by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre, is discussed as an important harmonisation framework that has helped align European LCA practice around recommended methods and datasets. The fourth phase — interpretation — synthesises the results of the inventory and impact assessment into conclusions relevant to the study's stated goal, identifies the key issues and contributors to total environmental impact, performs sensitivity and uncertainty analyses to test the robustness of findings, and formulates recommendations for design improvement, policy, or further research.
The book's third major section extends beyond methodology into a rich array of application domains: product design and eco-design, environmental policy development, prospective LCA for emerging technologies, waste management, building and construction LCA, food and agriculture, transport, nanotechnology, and the relationship between LCA and related concepts such as environmental product declarations (EPDs), carbon footprinting, ecolabelling schemes, and cradle-to-cradle design. Throughout, the authors balance technical rigour with pedagogical clarity, using a consistent illustrative example that evolves chapter by chapter to show how methodological choices interact in practice.