A Proposed LCA Model of Environmental Effects With Markovian Decision Making

As the pool of existing non-renewable natural resources continues to shrink, it will be necessary for government and industrial leaders to achieve a workable strategy for the intelligent allocation of scarce resources. In this paper, a method of quantifying the environmental and resource impacts of product redesign is proposed. This new method utilizes Input Output Analysis coupled with the Markovian decision making into a single matrix-based tool. The benefit of a fully developed tool would be the ability to make informed pre-production decisions leading to optimum product and process designs with minimal environmental impact. This paper illustrates this technique with an example based upon real industry data and extrapolated effects.