A Critique of Life Cycle Assessment; Where Are the People?
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1-s2.0-S2212827118300039-main.pdf
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211.48 KB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
8271f05722f0bc1ee48d09e2c07ae26d
Author(s)
Gutowski, Timothy G
Date Issued
April 2018
Journal
Procedia CIRP
Publisher
Elsevier BV
Citation
Gutowski, Timothy G. “A Critique of Life Cycle Assessment; Where Are the People?” Procedia CIRP 69 (2018): 11–15. © 2018 The Author
Version
Final published version
Abstract
In this article, we provide a framework and examples to illustrate how human behavior can disrupt the expected environmental outcomes suggested by Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). The biggest problems are when LCA results are scaled up to make claims about possible future outcomes within a narrowly crafted scenario that ignores real human behavior. There are however, many examples at smaller scales too, where (often) engineers using LCA appear to ignore the behavior of other engineers involved in the development scenario. We argue for the inclusion of more social science in the development of environmental LCA, and the use of a wider array of scenarios (grounded in real behaviors) to portray the possible future development of a product or service at large scale. Ultimately people, not products, need to be at the center of this discussion. Keywords: human behavior, Life Cycle Assessments, social science
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Mechanical Engineering
Terms of Use
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License
Persistent DSpace Link
DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1016/J.PROCIR.2018.01.002
