Automotive Life Cycle Assessment: Overview, Metrics, and Examples

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is an emerging methodology for use in evaluating the environmental performance of a product over its entire life cycle. However, the conventional method tends to be costly and slow to implement and is also quite controversial. In this paper, a modified approach called MLCA is presented, which capitalizes on the strengths of LCA and makes a clear distinction between MLCA and regulations. The new method is applied to two case studies and results are compared to output from three different single indicator LCA methods applied to the same cases. It is found that MLCA results are more detailed and transparent than single indicator output and this facilitates product decision making when environmental criteria are needed.