Life Cycle Assessment of Complex Products - Introducing an Efficient and Reliable Method

There is a broad consensus that the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) framework according to IS0 14040-14043 is very useful for pursuing the vision of sustainable development in product design and optimization. However due to the necessary effort involved, in practice the application of this framework to complex products like automobiles is very limited. This article deals on the one hand with methodological approaches for simplifying LCA in a systematic way. On the other hand it presents the existing method of the Iterative Screening LCA as an already sound and efficient simplifying method, suitable for assessing complex products.