Exploring the Viability of Probabilistic Under-Specification To Streamline Life Cycle Assessment

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a technique used to assess the environmental impact of products, processes, or materials. Recently, its importance as a decision-making tool to help evaluate current inventories and innovation of environmentally responsible products has grown; however, the amount of information needed to completely assess even the simplest product’s environmental impact may require significant time and resources. Myriad quantitative and qualitative effort-reducing strategies have been considered to accelerate the pace and reduce the cost of LCA. Although these streamlining methodologies reduce the time and effort of conducting LCA, they introduce variability and uncertainty into the results, creating a challenge for stakeholders who may need to make decisions based on the information. This Article explores the impact of streamlining on the credibility of LCA results given the uncertainty in the context of several case studies related to materials production in common consumer products. A technique for the structured analysis of the bill of materials is proposed, which leverages statistical analysis in the context of uncertainty