Abstract: In the ISO standards 14040 and 14044 the capital goods are explicitly part of the product system. To quantify the environmental relevance of capital goods and infrastructures their contribution is quantified in a large variety of product and service systems. The importance is assessed on the basis of several hundreds of cradle to gate LCAs of product and service LCAs. The importance within product (and service) groups is evaluated with statistical methods by comparing the LCA results including and excluding capital goods and infrastructures. On one hand, a classification of product and service groups is proposed to give better guidance on when and where capital goods and infrastructures should be included or can be neglected. On the other hand, impact categories with a particularly extreme behaviour with regard to capital goods and infrastructures are identi-fied. The presentation will propose rules of thumb with regard to the inclusion or exclusion of capital goods and infrastructures.
Abstract: Life cycle assessment (LCA) has proved to be a powerful tool for the environmental improvement of production processes in the agri-food sector. However, the increased use of the LCA method to analyse systems is hindered by the lack of agreement on the use of methods and by the difficult availability of life cycle inventory (LCI) data. The aim of the project is to investigate data for biomass production, conversion to biofuels and use for transport services. The production of fuels like ethanol, rape seed methyl ether, BTL (biomass-to-liquid), etc. is investigated in a way consistent with the existing ecoinvent datasets. This presentation focuses on this extension and outlines the possible uses of these data for the environmental assessments of renewable energies based on biomass. It highlights methodological issues relevant for global biofuel production. One very relevant issue is the accounting for CO2 emissions due to land transformation and clear cutting of tropical rain forests that is an important aspect for producing soya in Brazil and palm oil in Malaysia. A further issue is the allocation approach chosen for the modelling in a background database. Results from the LCA study, comparing and analysing a range of different biofuel production chains, are presented. The consistent and coherent LCI datasets for basic processes make it easier to perform LCA studies, and increase the credibility and acceptance of the life cycle results. The content of the database is made publicly available via the website www.ecoinvent.org.