In Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), unit processes describe the individual processes over a product's life cycle. Our complex economies are reflected in today's LCA databases by thousands of interconnected unit processes, which together describe the life cycle of a product.
The Modular LCA framework is essentially a systematic way of structuring parts of a product's life cycle into so-called modules. Modules can, e.g., be used to represent life cycle stages and alternatives for a given life cycle stage. Modules can automatically be linked to a modular system (e.g. representing the full life cycle of a product broken down into life cycle stages) and the environmental performance of the system including all provided alternatives can be calculated.
Key applications of the Modular LCA framework:
- associating unit processes and impact assessment results with life cycle stages
- streamlining LCA based scenario comparisons (e.g. alternative manufacture, transportation, use phase or disposal processes)
- identifying and optimizing key choices in value chains
- linking LCA with other models (e.g. linear programming, material flow analysis)
In a way you can think of Modular LCA as breaking down a puzzle into pieces of your choice, adding alternative pieces, and recombining all of these to analyze the differences - in a much easier way than possible with traditional LCA software.
The Modular LCA approach and some applications are described in this paper: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-015-1015-3
The following illustration shows 5 modules related to passenger car transportation. Each module relates to a set of unit processes describing part of the life cycle (1). Upstream processes are included by default, but cut-offs can be used to delimit the scope of a module. Each module has a user defined output and, if a cut-off has been defined, also an input. Based on the naming of inputs and outputs (products), the modules are automatically combined to a modular system, which can contain alternatives (2). Impact Assessment results for all resulting scenarios can be calculated automatically (here a contribution analysis by product/module)(3).
The most comfortable way of using the Modular LCA framework is via the graphical user interface of the Activity Browser software. https://bitbucket.org/bsteubing/activity-browser
Of course, the framework does not strictly require a graphical user interface. An example notebook is provided here.
Copyright (c) 2015 Bernhard Steubing.