Get a comprehensive overview of life cycle assessment including the basics, benefits, limitations, and interpretation best practices. As environmental awareness increases in the general public, many companies have begun to explore ways of moving beyond mere compliance to evaluating the effects and performance of products and practices over their entire lifetimes. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a tool designed to provide this evaluation using a “cradle-to-grave” approach for assessing industrial systems. The present online course designed by Dr. Mark P. Rossow, Ph.D., P.E. gives an overview of life cycle assessment and walks through how to conduct an LCA and/or manage someone conducting an LCA. “Cradle-to-grave” begins with gathering raw materials from the earth to create the product and ends after they're returned to the earth. LCA evaluates all stages of a product’s life from the perspective that they're interdependent, meaning that one operation leads to the next. LCA also enables the estimation of cumulative environmental impacts resulting from all stages of the product lifecycle. Oftentimes, these impacts are not considered in more traditional analyses (e.g., raw material extraction, material transportation, ultimate product disposal, etc.). By including the impacts throughout the product lifecycle, LCA provides a comprehensive view of the environmental aspects of the product or process and a more accurate picture of the true environmental trade-offs in product and process selection. The information presented in this engineering, PDH-approved course is derived from extensive years of experience and the EPA's “Life Cycle Assessment: Principles and Practice".

Learning Objectives

• Definition of life cycle assessment
• Benefits and limitation of conducting an LCA
• How to define goals for life cycle assessment
• Life cycle inventory and the key steps involved
• Life cycle impact assessment and its key steps
• Life cycle interpretation