Life Cycle Costing (LCC)

A method for totting up all the costs of a product or system over its life span: investment, operation, maintenance, energy, chemicals, and end-of-life, and where relevant the revenue from recovered products such as reclaimed water or nutrients. Future costs are discounted so they can be compared with present ones. Environmental LCC uses the same system boundary and functional unit as the matching LCA, so the economic and environmental results describe exactly the same system. It is the economic pillar of AWARE’s assessment.