Land Use
An impact category for the occupation and transformation of land and the resulting loss of soil quality and habitat. It matters for comparing compact technologies with land-hungry ones such as…
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 L.
L
LCIA Method
A packaged set of impact categories, characterisation models and factors -- and sometimes normalisation and weighting sets -- used to carry out impact assessment consistently. Widely used examples are the…
Life Cycle
The consecutive and interlinked stages of a product system, from raw material acquisition or generation from natural resources to final disposal. For a water reuse scheme this typically spans construction…
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)
A method for quantifying the environmental impacts of a product or system across its whole life cycle, standardised in ISO 14040 and ISO 14044. A study runs through four phases:…
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…
Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA)
The third phase of an LCA, which translates the inventory's long list of flows into a short set of environmental impact indicators. Each flow is assigned to the impact categories…
Life Cycle Inventory (LCI)
The second phase of an LCA: compiling every input and output of the system per functional unit -- energy, chemicals, materials, water, emissions to air, water and soil, and waste.…
Life Cycle Inventory Database
A curated collection of datasets describing common processes -- electricity generation, chemical production, transport, waste treatment -- that practitioners use to model the background of their systems. ecoinvent, maintained by…
Life Cycle Management (LCM)
Using life cycle thinking in everyday business and policy decisions -- in product design, procurement, investment and strategy -- so that environmental and socio-economic burdens are reduced across the whole…
Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA)
The combination of LCA, LCC and S-LCA into one assessment covering the environmental, economic and social dimensions of sustainability. The three must share the same product system, boundaries and functional…
Life Cycle Thinking (LCT)
The habit of judging a product, service or process by everything it causes over its whole life -- from extracting raw materials, through manufacture, use and maintenance, to disposal or…
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).
