Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)

2.2 What is Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)?

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a strategic framework and an effective methodology used to evaluate the environment impacts related to all the phases of a product’s life, that is, from the stage of raw material extraction , processing of materials, manufacturing, distribution, usage, repairing and maintaining the product, to its disposal. In this study, the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) will be used for the pineapple (N36) production in Alor Bukit, Pontian, Johor Darul Takzim.

Figure 1 : The phase of Life Cycle Assessment (Source : Environment International, Volume 30, Issue 5, July 2004, Life Cycle Assessment)

Generally, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a framework and methodology for the identification

The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has the obvious advantage of revealing potentially significant but hidden environmental impacts. Instead of focusing attention on large, concentrated and readily apparent point sources of impacts.

2.2.1 History of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA)

As we all know, the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is an effective framework to analyze the whole process of a product. The first attempt to look at extended product systems can be traced back to as early as the 1960s. This work mainly focused on calculating energy requirements. Several such fuel cycle studies were conducted in the United States by the Department of Energy. Although they focused on energy characteristics, these studies also included limited estimates of environmental releases.

With the oil shortages in the early 1970s, both the U.S. and British governments commissioned extensive studies of industrial studies to conduct detailed energy analyses.

Then, it is left to form Franklin Associates Ltd. Activity in the United States on environmental LCAs continued at a slow but steady, pace of around two or three studies per year. The exact number is not certain because most studies were performed for private clients and not released for public

It explicitly outlined the components of contemporary LCA: goal definition, inventory assessment, impact assessment and improvement analysis.

2.2.2 The Product Life Cycle

The life cycle a generic industrial product was defined by SETAC, 1991 as being composed of the following stages: (a) Raw Material Acquisition All activities necessary to extract raw material and energy inputs from the environment, including the transportation prior to processing.

(b) Process and Manufacturing Activities needed to convert the raw material and energy inputs into the desired product. In practice this stage is often composed of a series of substages with intermediate products being formed along the processing chain.

(c) Distribution and Transportation Shipment of the final product to the end user.

(d) Use, Reuse and Maintenance Utilization of the finished product over its service.

(e) Recycle Begins after the product has served its initial intended function and is subsequently recycled within the same product system (closed-loop recycle) or enters a new product system (open-loop