Environmental Project, 907 – LCA and the working environment

LCA and the Working Environment

6 Interpretation

6.1 Introduction

Interpretation of the results of a LCA should according to the ISO 14040-series (ISO/CD 14043-2, 1998) be "a systematic technique to identify, qualify, check and evaluate information from the results of the life cycle inventory analysis and/or impact assessment of a product system, and present them in order to meet the requirements of the application as described in the goal and scope of the study".

The standard is still a draft and it may be changed significantly. At the same time, there is very limited experience with the use of the new methodology as only one case has been described. It is therefore chosen firstly to describe the possibilities and limitations of the present methodology in general terms and – in a subsequent chapter – to describe the findings of the case and how they can be interpreted.

6.2 Why include the working environment in LCA?

The objective of including the working environment in LCA is most often stated to be the desire to be able to make products with less environmental impacts without increasing the impacts in the working environment. The following guidelines for interpretation are aimed at LCAs with this goal.

6.3 What can the working environmental LCA tell the practitioner?

The described methodology has a relatively low degree of precision with respect to specific materials and processes. The developed database is however so broad that it is now possible to cover a large part of the life cycle with respect to working environmental impacts as demonstrated in the case study.

The first option that emerges is to pinpoint the most important activities in the product system and examine these in more and more detail. As in a LCA of the natural environment, some typical patterns for products and product systems can be seen.

6.3.1 Energy consuming products

In products or product systems using electricity during the use, this will presumably be a very dominant factor with respect to working environmental impacts. A closer examination will reveal that the impacts from coal mining is the dominant factor in electricity consumption (at least in Denmark). An even closer scrutiny will reveal that underground mining is much worse that open cut mining. On the same level of detail, the database will show that there are large variations from country to country. Going back to the basic statistical sources it can be seen that there are large variations between the mines in a country, and also that there are considerable variations from year to year in a given mine.

The possibilities for reduction of the working environmental impacts that can be drawn from this stepwise examination can be summarised as follows:

Reduce the electricity consumption of the product
Change the product's energy source from electricity to oil - or perhaps even better - natural gas, or
Change the fuel for electricity production from coal to natural gas or oil
Increase the efficiency in electricity production
Import coal from the countries with least working environmental impacts in the coal mines
- Coal from open mines
- Coal from specific mining operators with a high working environmental standard
- etc.

The recommendations regarding electricity consumption are thus in line with those that can be obtained from a general LCA. It can also be seen that the results can be interpreted at different levels of detail and thereby meet the needs of different decision-makers, from the product developer to the electricity producer.

6.3.2 Non-electricity consuming products

Most of the common consumer products do not consume electricity during use. In this type of products, the working environmental impact profile will therefore be different.

For products with a short life, e.g. packaging for food products, the impacts will mainly be related to the production steps before the use phase. For products with a long life, e.g. an office chair, the product may have an impact both during its production and its use. As explained earlier, the methodology does not give the possibility of distributing the impacts in a given process, e.g. office work, on the multitude of products used to perform the work. In conclusion, the methodology is best suited to assess the impacts during the production steps.

It will be a general finding that the heavier a product, the more working environmental impacts will be the result. More precisely, this will be the case if the product is made of a single material or if the proportion of the used materials do not change from a lightweight product to a heavy product. This conclusion is also in line with the general findings in LCA. One should, however, be aware that this finding is inherent in the methodology because of the basic assumptions. Another inherent implication is that differences in the working environmental impacts between two or more producers of similar products, e.g. cartons for milk packaging, can not be identified by using the method.

The possibility of distinguishing between products is better when different materials are used in products fulfilling the same function. One such example is paper bags and plastic bags used for transportation of consumer goods from the supermarket to the home. A LCA of these simple products will reveal large differences in the working environmental impacts as well as in other effect categories. The difference in working environmental impacts reflects the average working conditions through the two life cycles.

The same possibility is not present if bags made of polyethylene and polypropylene are compared. Information on the working environmental impacts as well as production volume has been collected on the sector level, and the resulting impact per kilo material is exactly the same for the two products. This finding is probably in good accordance with the actual impacts in a given company.

For more complicated products, e.g. office chairs, the results from a working environmental LCA can point to the materials and processes with the highest potential for impacts. This knowledge may be used by the producer when choosing a supplier, e.g. by having the suppliers answering a questionnaire with general questions concerning the management of the working environment (is the working environment included in the environmental management system?) and specific questions on materials and processes (e.g. are carcinogenic substances being used in the production, or does the noise level exceed 85 dB in the production process?)

6.3.3 Comparisons using company specific information and average values

The lack of detail in the database can to some extent be counterweighted by the possibility of comparing the performance of a company with the average of the entire industry. In practice, this is done by collecting the information given to the Labour Inspectorate regarding work related injuries and accidents for e.g. a five-year period and relate this information to the produced volume in the same period. The latter information is best collected by using input-data for the company, i.e. how many kilos of raw materials was bought in the period.

It is obvious that this type of comparison is associated with a large uncertainty, especially for small companies with a very low number of accidents and injuries. For larger companies, the comparison may however provide useful information.

6.3.4 Comparisons on the societal level

When LCA of the working environment is used in life cycle decision-making on the societal or political level, the present methodology has both advantages and disadvantages.

The advantage of the methodology is that it is possible to examine the difference in working environmental impacts between the systems investigated. As indicated many places in the report, the products under examination must be different with respect to the material composition in order to see differences other than those introduced by differences in weight. If, however, the examined products differ with respect to material composition, it may be possible to observe a difference in working environmental impacts, not only with respect to the number of injuries and accidents, but also with respect to their nature. A shift from product A to product B may for example increase the expected number of hearing damages while the number of reported cancer incidents presumably will be smaller.

The main disadvantage of the methodology lies in the basics of the methodology, i.e. that average data are used to describe sectors with a large variation in the output of materials and products. Decision-makers must be aware of these shortcomings if unjustified decisions are to be avoided.

In relation to communication of working environmental conditions at the company level, at least two tools are seen as more operational than working environmental LCA. Work place assessments give an overview of the impacts of a given process at at specific company and provide a prioritisation of the efforts that potentially can minimise these impacts. A certified working environmental management system like OHSAS 18001 ensures that a company fulfils all legal requirements and that the company is devoted to a continuous effort to prevent working place injuries on both the short and long term.