Recent developments in Life Cycle Assessment: assessing the impacts of water use
Event details
| Date | 03.04.2012 |
| Hour | 16:15 |
| Speaker | Dr Stefanie Hellweg, IFU-ETHZ |
| Location | |
| Category | Conferences - Seminars |
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is increasingly used in practice to identify and improve key environmental processes in the life cycle of industrial processes, products or even consumption patterns. In the presentation the strengths and weaknesses of LCA will be discussed and new methodological developments and applications will be presented. New methods for life cycle impact assessment will be presented, in particular with regard to the assessment of the environmental damages from freshwater use. For water use, a regionalized approach is necessary, since the impacts vary greatly as a function of location. The method is applied to the case studies of worldwide agricultural production as well as electricity production in the United States. The results show that, depending on the location, water use can be relevant or even dominate the environmental damages. Therefore, the consideration of water consumption is crucial in Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies that include water-intensive products, such as agricultural goods. The presented method is useful for environmental decision-support in the production of water-intensive products as well as for environmentally responsible value-chain management.
Links
Practical information
- General public
- Free
Contact
- Prof. Christian Ludwig, PSI-EPFL