Impact Category
An environmental issue an LCA reports on, such as climate change, freshwater eutrophication, acidification, human toxicity, ecotoxicity, resource depletion or water use. Reporting several categories rather than one is deliberate:…
Glossary Terms
Working definitions for the terms that recur across this project: the circular economy, water resource recovery and reuse, and the life cycle methods -- LCA, LCC and S-LCA -- that AWARE combines into one sustainability assessment. They are written for a general reader rather than for specialists.
Showing entries beginning with I.
I
Impact Subcategory
In S-LCA, a specific social issue assessed for a stakeholder category -- for example health and safety, fair salary or working hours for workers; access to material resources, safe and…
Infrastructure (Capital Goods)
Long-lived assets used to deliver a product rather than consumed by it: buildings, tanks, pipes, pumps, membranes. Many LCAs leave them out on the grounds that their impact, spread over…
Interpretation
The final phase of an LCA, where results are checked for completeness, sensitivity and consistency, and turned into conclusions, limitations and recommendations that match the study's goal. Good interpretation says…
Definitions are written for this site in plain language. The selection of terms was checked against the Life Cycle Initiative terminology (UNEP), the ILCA Common Glossary and the SimaPro LCA glossary, and against ISO 14040/14044, ISO 14046, ISO 14075 and the UNEP Guidelines for Social Life Cycle Assessment (2020).
