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

The Working Environment in LCA

1 Introduction

The primary purpose of the present guidelines is to make LCA-practitioners able to include the working environment (WE) in LCA along with other types of impacts. The secondary purpose is to give the decision-makers, i.e. the persons who at the end of the day shall use the results, an impression of the possibilities and limitations of the method.

The main reason for including the working environment in LCA is to give a possibility to examine whether environmental product improvements are implemented on the expense of a deteriorated working environment.

The method has therefore been developed in order to make it possible to perform a general assessment of the changes in working environmental impacts that are induced by changes in the choice of materials and processes. This knowledge can subsequently be combined with more specific knowledge about potential hazards in relevant sectors and form the basis for a dialogue between the actors in a product chain. WE-LCA can thus be seen as a natural component in the efforts for development of products with less impacts on the environment and human health.

It is, however, not possible to examine or protect against deterioration as a consequence of company-specific changes, e.g. an increased tempo or efficiency, by using the developed LCA-methodology. For this purpose, work place assessments for each employee is a better suited tool that cannot be replaced by WE-LCA.

Including the working environment in LCA is basically a question of being able to calculate the potential WE-impacts per functional unit by adding the impacts from a number of processes and other activities. The present guidelines show a way to do this and contain at the same time a database that covers a large number of processes.

Until now, the lack of a broad database has been an important barrier against inclusion of the working environment in LCA. It is therefore expected that the working environment will be included more often in LCA in the future. It is, however, mentioned here that the database developed in the current project has some inherent uncertainties. As an example, the database figures will present an underestimation of the actual impacts if the processes take place in less developed countries.

Toady’s lack of a broad database can partly be explained by a missing international interest in including the working environment in LCA. The method development in international LCA has so far been marked by a high degree of exchange of experiences, leading to consensus on procedures for making inventories and impact assessment and – subsequently – data exchange.

Method development in WE-LCA has mainly been a Scandinavian issue, but the co-operation between the countries has been limited. The historical dimension is presented briefly at the end of the guidelines, and a more detailed description of other available methods for WE-LCA can be found in the technical report that forms the basis for the present guidelines.

1.1 Overview of the content

The essential elements in the method are presented in chapter 2 together with an assessment of the sensitivity, limitations and uncertainties of the method. The purpose of chapter 2 is to give both LCA-practitioners and decision-makers a broad knowledge of the method in order to create a common understanding of the principles.

Chapter 3 contains an overview and discussion of the method in relation to the steps specified in the ISO 14040-series: Inventory, Impacts assessment and Interpretation. The discussion focuses on the new method, but parallels to other methods for working environmental LCA are drawn. The chapter ends with an example on how the method can be applied on a specific case.

Chapter 4 contains a short description of the historical development of working environmental LCA. This description is included in order to give the background for the development process in the current project. The chapter ends with suggestions for the future developments in working environmental LCA.

In the Appendix to the guidelines the database that was developed in the project can be found. The database contains information on about 80 unit processes.

The frames for the present guidelines do not give the possibility for a detailed discussion of the elements in the method, including the advantages and limitations. The reader is referred to the technical report from the project, where these discussions are more detailed.

It is the hope of the project group that the working environment with the new method will find a natural position in LCA. It is our judgement that the method will be able to give essential information with a relatively modest consumption of time and resources. At the same time the method is open for improvement and extension of the database through international cooperation. Hopefully, this will help create international consensus about a method for working environmental LCA within a relatively short period of time, using the basic procedure described in the current project.