Environmental Project, 907 – LCA and the working environment

LCA and the Working Environment

7 Comparison of methods

The present method differs significantly from the method described in EDIP97, the major difference being that the present method is a sector assessment without the possibility of examining specific processes at the company level. The advantages and disadvantages of this are discussed several places in the previous chapters and are summarised in the following.

7.1 Advantages of the present method

7.1.1 An extensive database

The present method is a sector assessment that is based exclusively on statistical information. This approach has allowed the development of a database regarding Danish working environmental impact. The database is fully documented in the report and gives thus the possibility of including working environmental impacts in LCA without having to collect and process information from scratch.

This is judged to be a major step forward as one of the obstacles in both general and working environmental LCA is the need to collect and process information from a large number of processes. A very crude conclusion is that there are no longer any excuses for not including the working environment in an LCA. The final choice of whether to include the working environment or not is however still up to the commissioner of the LCA study.

7.1.2 A uniform database

The database has to a very large extent been developed in a batch process using information from the Danish Labour Inspectorate and the Danish Statistical Agency. This means that the level of detail and precision is equal for all processes for which the information has been derived in this way.

7.1.3 Possibilities for international development

Both the methodology and the development of a database allow for an internationalisation of the method, i.e. it is possible for practitioners in other countries to develop national databases by using the same procedure.

There will of course be differences from one country to another as a consequence of different ways of reporting working environmental impacts on the sector level. This should, however, not be a great obstacle since the number of impact categories could be in- or decreased to meet the goal of the LCA. The most natural approach would be to include a discussion of the national differences in the sensitivity analysis and thereby secure that the life cycle overview is not lost.

7.2 Disadvantages of the present method

The major disadvantage of the present methodology is that the level of detail is relatively low. This is an inherent feature of the methodology that is caused by the level of detail in the basic statistical information.

7.2.1 Only an sector assessment

The methodology described is purely a sector assessment. This is in contrast to the method described in EDIP97 in which the methodology was a mixture of a process assessment and a sector assessment.

Including a process assessment increases the level of detail in some parts of the assessment and makes it possible to compare the activities in a given company or process to the rest of the life cycle. At the same time, however, mixing the two different approaches introduces additional uncertainties regarding aggregation over the life cycle as the data format in the two methods can only be made comparable by using a number of assumptions regarding exposure time. It is not possible to compare the uncertainty introduced by the two approaches.

7.2.2 No company specific information

The present methodology does not require any special efforts at the company level. This means that no improvement options can be identified at the company level.

It is, however, debatable whether the process assessment in EDIP97 is suitable for identification of improvement options. It is recognised that by following a product through the process line at a company some of the important working environmental impacts are identified and - to some extent - also quantified.

7.2.2.1 Work Place Assessments

In Denmark, Work Place Assessments (WPA) are mandatory in all companies with more than five employees. Every process is examined in order to find out whether it causes a working environmental impact. The examination is not restricted to a limited number of parameters like noise or chemical exposure, but should give a broad overview of all types of working environmental impacts, e.g. including psycho-social impacts and indoor climate.

The WPA approach is judged to give more detailed information on the working environment for single employees than the process assessment in EDIP97.

Another possibility for establishing product related information is to use the screening methodology suggested in EDIP97 and in MUP (Schmidt et al, 1994). The screening focuses on exposure to chemicals and may be used to identify the processes with the largest potential for many of the impacts that are examined in the sector assessment.

If exposure to hazardous chemicals (and other stressors in the working environment) is avoided or minimised it should ideally be reflected in a better working environmental profile. This is not possible when using a sector assessment based on statistical information from large economic sectors.

7.3 Comparison with international methods

7.3.1 The IVL-method

The present methodology is very similar to that developed by IVL in Sweden (Antonsson, 1999), the major difference being in the calculation procedure. The advantage of the present methodology in relation to the IVL-method is that it is possible to establish information on a more detailed level, i.e. for more sub-sectors including those where some of the economic output is measured in "pieces", "m2", "drums", etc.

7.3.2 The IVF-method

The method developed by IVF is exclusively a process assessment methodology with the inherent advantages and disadvantages associated with this type of assessment.

There is little doubt that the IVF method can provide relatively precise results at the company/process level, but the method is also very demanding in terms of resources (man time). This is prohibitive for the inclusion of working environment in LCA on the short term, but on the longer term the method can provide a very useful insight to working environmental impacts in the life cycle perspective.

7.4 Future developments

With the present methodology and the associated database a number of new possibilities have emerged.

7.4.1 PC-program

First of all, the necessary efforts in including the working environment in LCA have been reduced significantly. It is thus possible for LCA practitioners to use the developed database along with information on other impact categories without significant problems. The one remaining problem is that the present methodology and the database is not included in the EDIP PC-program, and it is suggested that the present methodology is included when the next updating of the PC-programme take place.

7.4.2 International collaboration

Secondly, the present methodology opens up for a broader international collaboration on working environment in LCA. The developed methodology is based on statistical information, part of which is well known and easily accessible on the national level (the goods statistics). Statistics on working environmental impacts probably differs more from one country to another, but it should still be possible to establish comparable information for many countries and thereby improve the number of application areas as well as the precision in working environmental LCA.

7.4.3 Process assessments

Process assessments are judged to give more precise results than sector assessments and they will therefore probably be the tool for the future.

It is recommended that future developments in working environmental LCA focus on establishing internationally acceptable methods for process assessment. The two main problems that should be addressed are the format of a common database and the possibilities for development of an internationally accepted impact assessment methodology.

With respect to the format of the database a major step forward would be to develop a format that could be used to integrate results from the new sector assessment method and the process assessment method outlined by IVF (and to some extent also in EDIP97). In doing so it would be possible to gradually improve the precision in working environmental LCAs as a consequence of obtaining more information on the specific process level.

With respect to the impact assessment methodology, one of the first tasks in this context should an investigation of the possibilities of using economic parameters, e.g. the willingness to pay for avoiding the potential impacts, as the guiding principle in the weighting procedure.