66
4 Life Cycle Assessment: Nice to Have or Essential …
4.4 Discussion
Over the past two decades, a rapid expansion of footprint-style indicators has
been observed by academics, companies, governmental bodies, and nongovernmental organizations, particularly in the arena of environmental and sustainability
discourses. Although nowadays footprints have reached worldwide popularity, a
dedicated footprint research community is far from being established. The ambiguous
relationship with LCA, for which there is such a community, poses a substantial
obstacle to achieving that goal.
There has been a growing interest in discussing the relationship between footprints and LCA. Many researchers have stressed the unique contributions of LCA to
the identification and quantification of footprints, with the intention of legitimizing
footprint indicators from a life cycle perspective. The strengths of LCA in assessing
environmental impacts could allow many footprint topics (e.g., climate change, water
use, biodiversity) to be addressed under an LCA framework, in particular those that
can be measured in relation to a functional unit. Examples include the carbon footprint
for climate change and the RDF for abiotic resource depletion (Sect. 4.1).
Nevertheless, footprint practitioners tend to stand alone in some way. One example
is the ecological footprint—the ancestor of the footprint family. From an LCA
perspective, the classical ecological footprint analysis, namely, the National Footprint Accounts (NFAs), corresponds to a more rough type of inventory analysis in
which hundreds of primary bio-products are simply tabulated and converted into the
land use elementary flow. The lack of transparency in defining system boundaries
and the exclusion to characterize inventory results make the NFA an unsuccessful
LCA, at least in the eyes of LCA experts.
Probably the most important thing that LCA users have learned from the ecological
footprint is the name—a good name sometimes means everything. Therefore, the
advent of the carbon footprint is not surprising. It begins with the task of competing
for public and corporate concerns on global warming—an issue that the ecological
footprint attempts to address as well but fails to receive due attention. The prosperity
of the carbon footprint moves LCA back to central stage, even though Hammond
(2007) suggests calling the carbon footprint “carbon weight” with the belief that
footprints should be area-based indicators in line with the ecological footprint.
Meanwhile, environmental input–output analysis (EIOA) has proved useful in
accounting for the carbon footprint at national and international scales (Hertwich and
Peters 2009). Increasingly, IO methods have also been found suitable for computing
the ecological footprint and many other footprints for nations, such as the water,
material, and biodiversity footprints. These, however, do not diminish the dominant
role of LCA in contemporary footprint analysis, especially in the domain of product
footprints where a great amount of theoretical and practical work has been done by
the LCA community on various environmental issues associated with production and
consumption.
In spite of this, saying that footprints must be LCA-based is, to some extent,
analogues to saying that footprints must be area-based—both are due to a lack
4 Life Cycle Assessment: Nice to Have or Essential …
4.4 Discussion
Over the past two decades, a rapid expansion of footprint-style indicators has
been observed by academics, companies, governmental bodies, and nongovernmental organizations, particularly in the arena of environmental and sustainability
discourses. Although nowadays footprints have reached worldwide popularity, a
dedicated footprint research community is far from being established. The ambiguous
relationship with LCA, for which there is such a community, poses a substantial
obstacle to achieving that goal.
There has been a growing interest in discussing the relationship between footprints and LCA. Many researchers have stressed the unique contributions of LCA to
the identification and quantification of footprints, with the intention of legitimizing
footprint indicators from a life cycle perspective. The strengths of LCA in assessing
environmental impacts could allow many footprint topics (e.g., climate change, water
use, biodiversity) to be addressed under an LCA framework, in particular those that
can be measured in relation to a functional unit. Examples include the carbon footprint
for climate change and the RDF for abiotic resource depletion (Sect. 4.1).
Nevertheless, footprint practitioners tend to stand alone in some way. One example
is the ecological footprint—the ancestor of the footprint family. From an LCA
perspective, the classical ecological footprint analysis, namely, the National Footprint Accounts (NFAs), corresponds to a more rough type of inventory analysis in
which hundreds of primary bio-products are simply tabulated and converted into the
land use elementary flow. The lack of transparency in defining system boundaries
and the exclusion to characterize inventory results make the NFA an unsuccessful
LCA, at least in the eyes of LCA experts.
Probably the most important thing that LCA users have learned from the ecological
footprint is the name—a good name sometimes means everything. Therefore, the
advent of the carbon footprint is not surprising. It begins with the task of competing
for public and corporate concerns on global warming—an issue that the ecological
footprint attempts to address as well but fails to receive due attention. The prosperity
of the carbon footprint moves LCA back to central stage, even though Hammond
(2007) suggests calling the carbon footprint “carbon weight” with the belief that
footprints should be area-based indicators in line with the ecological footprint.
Meanwhile, environmental input–output analysis (EIOA) has proved useful in
accounting for the carbon footprint at national and international scales (Hertwich and
Peters 2009). Increasingly, IO methods have also been found suitable for computing
the ecological footprint and many other footprints for nations, such as the water,
material, and biodiversity footprints. These, however, do not diminish the dominant
role of LCA in contemporary footprint analysis, especially in the domain of product
footprints where a great amount of theoretical and practical work has been done by
the LCA community on various environmental issues associated with production and
consumption.
In spite of this, saying that footprints must be LCA-based is, to some extent,
analogues to saying that footprints must be area-based—both are due to a lack