IEEE CPMT Symposium on Green Electronics, Göteborg, Sweden Life Cycle Assessment – integrative part in continuous corporate decision-

Abstract: Stimulated in particular by the recent EU enactments concerning electric and electronic goods – RoHS, their energy consumption – EuP, and their end of life treatment – WEEE (European Commission, 2003a; European Commission, 2003b; European Commission, 2005) environmental aspects are increasingly recognised as being important ensuring sustainable economy. So far various approaches, and even more tools, have been developed in order to assess the environmental implications related to artificial actions. Having its methodological roots in the late 1960ies (Platt and Rowe, 2002) and being under continuous development since, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) nowadays is recognised as a very strong tool when it comes to the assessment of the environmental performance of products 1. The overall intention of LCA was and is to analyse the environmental performance of products, to identify improvement potentials and, thus, to assist to reduce the potential environmental impact attributable to the concerned products (Anonymous, 1997). Today, from the perspective of researchers as well as of consultants, the LCA methodology has been proven to be applicable to products as simple as, for instance, a sheet of paper and, on the other hand, to complex products like mobile phones or even entire mobile phone networks (Stark, 2005; Scharnhorst et al., 2006). Though being aware of the method’s advantages, industry often still hesitates to practice LCA. Thereby the concerns range from ‘being too expansive ’ to ‘unreliable results ’ and do not end up with ‘too complex’