Life cycle assessment 283
and for both practitioners and their audience. Therefore, LCA as a mindset
provides a possibility to avoid the myopia of solely focusing on single sectors
or nations.
14.4.3 Circularity
What are the implications of the expansion of life cycle thinking in different
contexts? The results of the life cycle mindset’s mainstreaming may be new
concepts and ideas formed in business, academia and policy. Industrial
Ecology’s concepts and tools further evolving in life cycle thinking brought
in applied concepts such as the circular economy (Saavedra et al., 2018,
p. 1519) and the cascading use of biomass, functioning as autonomous and
powerful social and political discourses. While LCA and circular economy
share a view of the flow of the resources in the world as cyclic or circular,
most LCAs are made for an industrial reality that is seen as linear, for instance
as a supply or value chain. The recycling of materials from a product system is
therefore often treated as a deviation from the normal operating system. In
combination with the need to define the life cycle and its system boundaries,
similar issues of division and burden- partitioning between co- products
emerge for recycled materials (Ekvall & Tillman, 1997).
For instance, the environmental impacts from the recycling processes may
be attributed to only one life cycle, or divided into multiple ones. Similarly,
the benefits which arise from recycling and reuse of a material instead of
relying on virgin production must be credited to either one or both life cycles
– unless subsequent life cycles (and their functions) can be studied as an
aggregate system. In theory, LCA always allows for expanding the studied
system in order to avoid division issues, but the questions posed to LCA often
require such division as they concern a single function, such as environmentally preferable transportation, food, heat, etc. In systems where outputs
fulfil fundamentally different functions, such as the use of slaughterhouse
waste to produce transportation fuel, an aggregated study may not be considered helpful to the decisions at hand.
Further challenges arise from the ideas of material loops and cascading
material use, implying fuzzy borders between products, by- products and
waste outputs. In 2008 some controversial papers relating to bioethanol
pointed to residues as one safer option for biomass supply. But are organic
residues per definition better resources from an environmental point of view?
Waste materials have often been considered “free” as resources in terms of
environmental impact (Oldfield, White & Holden, 2018; Pradel, Aissani,
Villot, Baudez & Laforest, 2016), and such an assumption is currently implemented in the EU Renewable Energy Directive calculation rules, where agricultural and processing residues are to be considered burden- free at the point
of collection (Annex V, part C, point 18). There is, however, no rule or
definitive logic in LCA which states that residual materials have zero environmental impact, especially not when wastes are increasingly considered as
and for both practitioners and their audience. Therefore, LCA as a mindset
provides a possibility to avoid the myopia of solely focusing on single sectors
or nations.
14.4.3 Circularity
What are the implications of the expansion of life cycle thinking in different
contexts? The results of the life cycle mindset’s mainstreaming may be new
concepts and ideas formed in business, academia and policy. Industrial
Ecology’s concepts and tools further evolving in life cycle thinking brought
in applied concepts such as the circular economy (Saavedra et al., 2018,
p. 1519) and the cascading use of biomass, functioning as autonomous and
powerful social and political discourses. While LCA and circular economy
share a view of the flow of the resources in the world as cyclic or circular,
most LCAs are made for an industrial reality that is seen as linear, for instance
as a supply or value chain. The recycling of materials from a product system is
therefore often treated as a deviation from the normal operating system. In
combination with the need to define the life cycle and its system boundaries,
similar issues of division and burden- partitioning between co- products
emerge for recycled materials (Ekvall & Tillman, 1997).
For instance, the environmental impacts from the recycling processes may
be attributed to only one life cycle, or divided into multiple ones. Similarly,
the benefits which arise from recycling and reuse of a material instead of
relying on virgin production must be credited to either one or both life cycles
– unless subsequent life cycles (and their functions) can be studied as an
aggregate system. In theory, LCA always allows for expanding the studied
system in order to avoid division issues, but the questions posed to LCA often
require such division as they concern a single function, such as environmentally preferable transportation, food, heat, etc. In systems where outputs
fulfil fundamentally different functions, such as the use of slaughterhouse
waste to produce transportation fuel, an aggregated study may not be considered helpful to the decisions at hand.
Further challenges arise from the ideas of material loops and cascading
material use, implying fuzzy borders between products, by- products and
waste outputs. In 2008 some controversial papers relating to bioethanol
pointed to residues as one safer option for biomass supply. But are organic
residues per definition better resources from an environmental point of view?
Waste materials have often been considered “free” as resources in terms of
environmental impact (Oldfield, White & Holden, 2018; Pradel, Aissani,
Villot, Baudez & Laforest, 2016), and such an assumption is currently implemented in the EU Renewable Energy Directive calculation rules, where agricultural and processing residues are to be considered burden- free at the point
of collection (Annex V, part C, point 18). There is, however, no rule or
definitive logic in LCA which states that residual materials have zero environmental impact, especially not when wastes are increasingly considered as