Environmental News, 72 – The Working Environment in LCA - A New Approach

The Working Environment in LCA

Summary and conclusions

The present guidelines describe a new methodology for inclusion of the working environment in life cycle assessments. The guidelines also include a database with many of the data that are necessary in order to perform an assessment.

The new methodology is suggested as an operational alternative to the original EDIP-methodology (EDIP97) that never has become a natural part of the overall method, probably because of the requirements in data collection and handling.

The new methodology is based on two types of Danish statistical information regarding economic sectors, i.e. information on the amounts being produced (in weight units) in a number of sectors, and information on the number of reported work-related diseases and damages in the same sectors. By combing the statistics it is possible to establish a figure for working environmental impacts per produced unit that can be used together with information on the impacts in the external environment.

The following impact categories are included in the assessment of the working environment:

Fatal accidents
Total number of accidents
CNS function disorder
Hearing damages
Cancer
Muscolo-sceletal disorders
Airway diseases (allergic)
Airway diseases (non-allergic)
Skin diseases
Psycho-social diseases

The main advantage of the new methodology is that it is much easier to collect and process the necessary information for a working environmental LCA. Another advantage is that the uncertainty in combining information from very different sources is avoided. Finally, it is possible to establish the same type of information for other countries, thereby facilitating thedevelopment of an even more extensive database.

The main limitation when using a sector assessment is that the level of detail cannot be increased beyond the level allowed by the basic statistical information. Assessment of specific processes is outside the scope of the methodology, and only larger companies can be expected to possess a set of statistics that can replace the average information from the whole sector.The method can thus not be used to assess the effect on the overall results following changes in the choice of specific processes or materials in a single company.

The established database covers about 80 economic sectors that are divided into four groups, i.e. raw material production (e.g. energy resources, metals, paper, etc.), production of intermediates and components (e.g. wood products, plastics, ceramics, metal products, etc.), production of final products (e.g. furniture and different electro-mechanic products) and transportation. The database is at present not integrated in the EDIP PC-tool, but is available in form of a spreadsheet.

The guidelines also describe how comparable information can be derived from companies whose activities are not included in the database. This type of information is most often significantly less detailed, but can be used to indicate the relative importance of a given activity.

It is concluded that the new methodology and the associated database can be used to make life cycle assessments of the working environment. This is demonstrated in a case study of an office chair, in which the magnitude of the actual impacts is examined along with the relative importance of the single activities. It is also possible to get an overview of which activities that are most important for each of the impact categories included in the methodology.