compliant with our definition of LCA networks and search criteria were set to .... i.e. on Facebook and LinkedIn [8, 9], using for all existing groups the key words: ...
Defining and Mapping LCA Networks: Initial Results Anders Bjørn, Mikołaj Owsianiak, Alexis Laurent, Christine Molin, Torbjørn B. Westh, and Michael Z. Hauschild Section for Quantitative Sustainability Assessment, Department of Management Engineering, Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Lyngby, Denmark
Abstract The exchange of experience between actors in the field of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is instrumental for disseminating competences in environmental assessment of products and systems in support of sustainable production and consumption. LCA networks have a potentially strong role in promoting the use of LCA and life cycle thinking, but the numbers and geographical locations of LCA networks around the globe is unknown. A definition of an LCA network is proposed and searching the internet and relevant social media a mapping of existing LCA networks following this definition is performed, identifying 58 networks (and additionally 29 grey zone networks not meeting the full definition) located primarily in Europe, the Americas, Southeast Asia and Oceania. Keywords: Lifecycle; Sustainable development; LCA network
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INTRODUCTION
Environmental Life cycle assessment (LCA) has gone through rapid development over the last two decades, which is reflected in highly visible initiates such as European Platform on Life Cycle Assessment and the international Life Cycle Initiative launched by United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and Society for Environmental Toxicology and Chemistry (SETAC) but also in an increasing number of publications and countries involved [1]. While LCA originally developed as an “analytical tool to help assess the environmental impacts from products or services” [2], LCA is being further developed into a tool that must encompass all three pillars of sustainability that is, in addition to the environmental, also the social and the economic dimensions [3]. To make LCA a useful tool for companies and authorities to meet sustainability challenges for products and technologies, it is necessary that research results and developed tools are adapted to meet the requirements of different applications and the conditions that prevail in different regions of the world. It is decisive that the tools and data are disseminated and implemented in practice, and that practitioners are trained all over the world and their competences strengthened. This calls for collaboration and communication between different research fields, and it necessitates involvement of stakeholders from business, policy-makers, and Non-governmental Organisations (NGOs). LCA networks may facilitate the communication between the multiple stakeholders and strengthen the regional or local exchange of experience by connecting individual actors. The development of LCA networks thereby becomes an important facilitator for implementing life cycle oriented approaches in sustainable development across the world, and it was to create an overview of existing and emerging networks, that this study was initiated. The UNEP/SETAC Life Cycle Initiative has a strong focus on the dissemination of LCA and Life Cycle Thinking in all parts of the world in support of sustainable production and consumption and capacity building is a central element. Attempts are therefore made to ensure contacts to local LCA competences and potential anchor points in as many countries as possible. An overview of LCA networks at the
European scale was created for the CALCAS project in 2009 [4] but apart from this we have no knowledge of any published surveys that provide a definition of LCA networks. The work aims to provide a basis for a future comprehensive characterization of LCA networks, including analyzes of their goals, scopes, activities, and roles in coupling LCA methodology and LCA application, and thus in meeting sustainability challenges. Starting with a clear definition of an LCA network we develop a mapping methodology and present the preliminary results of a global mapping of LCA networks. Finally we discuss the potential role of national and regional LCA networks in supporting the dissemination of Life Cycle approaches. 2
DEFINITION OF LCA NETWORKS
The definition of an LCA networks that we applied is that it must have all of the following characteristics: • Supports a life cycle approach and/or mention LCA or Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) in mission/vision/’goal and scope’. • Is an independent entity and not merely a subject specific subchapter of a larger network; Local networks that are members of regional networks are not excluded. • Is non-profit and hence uses revenues to achieve its goals rather than to distribute them as profit or dividends. • Is based on some degree of central control and coordination (thus excluding LCA fora). • Includes, as a minimum, members from both academia and industry (authorities, consultancies, and NGOs, etc. are allowed, but not required). • Embodies a communication platform to connect all the members (e.g. newsletter, website, etc.). During the mapping of LCA networks (see Section 3), we identified a number of organizations or associations, which fulfill some of the criteria in the LCA network definition elaborated for this study, but not all. Examples are networks that deal with sustainability in a broader sense, and only cover LCA issues to a limited extent, or networks
19th CIRP International Conference on Life Cycle Engineering, Berkeley, 2012
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that are specific subchapters of LCA networks dealing only with e.g. Life Cycle Inventory (LCI). In this study such networks were categorized as “grey zone networks” and were reported separately because awareness of their existence and the potential for some of them to become LCAnetworks can be valuable information in pursuing the overall goal of this paper. 3
Google detailed search
MAPPING METHODOLOGY
To inventorize LCA networks, we followed a 2-step procedure: (1) building of a preliminary inventory of the networks based on data available in literature and on the web; (2) supplementary mapping through web based LCA dialogue and discussion fora/social networks to render the inventory as complete as possible. The mapping methodology was designed to identify networks compliant with our definition of LCA networks and search criteria were set to match the different requirements. Therefore, the list of identified “grey-zone networks” cannot be regarded as exhaustive – it is likely that many other LCA-related “grey zone networks” exist in addition to the ones included in this study. 3.1
results. It was found that rather than identifying homepages for specific networks in the country specified in the search string, the search primarily returned networks mentioned in another context (e.g. linked to another LCA related web page, mentioned in scientific papers, etc.). Moreover it was found that, though many LCA related hits were returned, only a few of them were related to actual LCA networks (e.g. many related to studies of physical networks).
Preliminary Inventory
Existing literature on LCA network mapping was first screened. This led to identifying two major reports –see Table 1, where 19 LCAnetworks were identified, most of them primarily located in Europe. Title of study
Scope of study
Ref.
D16 – “Strengthening European Networks on Life Cycle Topics – A CALCAS Contribution” (CALCAS project WP8)
Only covers Europe and does not include a robust definition of an LCA network.
[4]
Summary of Global Life Cycle Inventory Data (Deliverable if TF-1 (Database Registry) of the SETAC/UNEP LC Initiative)
Focus on networks related to LCI
[5]
Table 1: Overview of existing literature A systematic web search was additionally conducted to ensure a global and up-to-date network mapping as well as to include networks that have been overlooked or excluded from the scope of the literature studied. Four different web search activities were performed: (i) an initial Google-search screening; (ii) a detailed country- and language-oriented Google search [6]; (iii) a detailed country- and language-oriented Bing search [7]; and (iv) a search via social networks. Those four search activities are described in the following. Google screening The initial Google-search screening aimed to support the design of the search strings in the subsequent web search activities. To identify what search strings LCA networks generally respond to without implying the return of too many irrelevant hits, a simple search string was thus applied in Google: [country] LCA OR “Life Cycle Assessment” network. The search was performed with a number of countries known to have a high number of LCA activities in order to identify in what context LCA networks are typically found in the search
Based on the screening, a refined and iterative search methodology was established, with a high specificity of the search strings to ensure a manageable number of relevant search results. Following the definition of LCA-networks, the following search string was applied: (intitle:"Network" OR intitle:"platform" OR intitle:"society" OR intitle:"center" OR intitle:"centre" OR intitle:"organisation" OR intitle:"community" OR intitle: "association") (intitle:"life cycle" OR intitle:"life-cycle" OR intitle:"lca") ("sustainability" OR "environment"). The operator ‘intitle’ indicates that the word following must be part of the title of the website (or title of a section of a website) and is used here to narrow down the search to actual websites of LCA networks. The search was first refined to each individual country by using the ‘Region filter’ at Google’s Advanced Search application. This filter only returns hits, which have a DNS-address corresponding to the country selected (e.g. website ending with ‘.fr’ for France) and/or are physically hosted at an IP address corresponding to the country selected. All the hits were systematically investigated (less than 50 for most countries). Using the complete search string as given above, the search results returned only hits related to networks that have a website that is either in English or with English-translated web pages. However, websites of some LCA-networks are only available in their own language. To identify them, a second search was performed using the same string as above translated into Spanish, Portuguese, French, German, and Russian. No ‘Region filter’ was applied for these searches. Bing detailed search Search engines may apply different search algorithms, leading to different hits or order of hits in the results of a search. To identify networks with home pages that are sensitive to this, the detailed country- and language-specific search that was performed with the Google search engine (see above paragraph) was also conducted using the Bing search engine [7]. In practice, the only difference between the two detailed searches is that with the Bing search engine, the ‘Region filter’ was integrated into the search string itself. Social networks search The searches described above will only find networks that are present on the internet, but this may not always be the case. Newly formed LCA networks may thus launch their communication and other activities on a social network prior to establishing a webpage on their own. Therefore, a search on the two social networks thought to be most suitable to newly formed LCA networks was conducted, i.e. on Facebook and LinkedIn [8, 9], using for all existing groups the key words: LCA, Life Cycle Assessment, Life Cycle Analysis, Ciclo de Vida, ACV. The combination of the four search activities described above led to the identification of 30 LCA networks and 22 grey zone networks.
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none 1 2 3 4 5 6 Figure 1: Mapping of countries which are members of local (country-level) and/or regional (above country-level) LCA networks (numbers correspond to how many times a country is listed as a member). Global network (UNEP SETAC Life Cycle Initiative) is excluded to make the figure more legible. APLCANET and International Life Cycle Academy networks are excluded because of difficulties in attributing member countries due to a lack of working website at the time of search. East Timor and Tibet are listed as members of the South and South-East Asia (SEASIA) Network on Life Cycle Initiative of UNEP, but are not indicated in the map. All 27 EU member states of the European Platform on Life Cycle Assessment network are included.
However, there are numerous possibilities of combining new search strings and language restrictions and perform the searches applying new search engines. Small networks in regions where native languages were not covered by the web search (such as networks that do not have English versions of their websites and are only referred to in native languages) are thus likely to remain undetected by the search. 3.2
Supplementary Mapping for Inventory Completeness
These limitations in the web search (see section 3.1) mean that we cannot assume completeness in the coverage of existing LCA networks from the preliminary inventory. An additional gap in the inventory relates to LCA networks that may not have a website, thus making them unnoticed by the search. To try to include those networks that escaped the literature and web search in our mapping, an inquiry was sent to all members of 5 global and regional LCA discussion fora viz. the PRé Consultants’ LCA discussion list (over 2000 users) [10], and the 4 LinkedIn groups: ‘Life Cycle Assessment’ (1836), ‘LCA in Industry’ (580 members), ‘LCA and Environmental Assessment’ (502 members), ‘Life Cycle Assessment - Sustainable Supply Chain, Europe’ (171 members) [9]. Any information about LCA networks was requested from the members in those fora who are distributed all over the world and may possess informal knowledge not available on the web. The collected answers to the posting resulted in identifying 9 LCA networks and 7 grey zone networks, in addition to the ones already mapped through the preliminary inventory. A few of the additional
networks that escaped our web search turned out to possess uprunning websites, and thus should have been already identified. This clearly demonstrates that, although refined as best as possible, the search string used in the Google/Bing searches did not lead to a fully comprehensive mapping of LCA networks. The use of different combinations of keywords under different search restrictions would help reduce these uncertainties in future network mappings. 4
RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
In total, we identified 58 LCA networks that meet our definition criteria, covering 69 countries (Figure 1). It is noteworthy that among the mapped LCA networks, 12 were associated with insufficient data to determine whether they fully complied with all definition criteria, although they were still included in the list based on arbitrary judgment. An on-going work conducted by the authors of this study currently aims to characterize the activities of all the mapped networks, and thus soon should provide the necessary information to solve these cases. Such work should also help refine the number of covered countries although additional uncertainties arise about the country coverage of some regional LCA networks that are scoped by their status. For example, the countries covered by LCA networks currently includes all EU-27 countries that, by definition, belong to the European Platform on Life Cycle Assessment network although it is questionable whether or not LCA activities take place in all of them; this will also require further investigation.
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Out of the 29 “grey zone” networks that were reported from the study (see Table 1), some of them are likely to become LCA networks as they currently come short to meet one or two criteria in the definition of LCA networks, but are expected to meet these in a short-tomedium term perspective. A number of grey zone networks are thus networks that include several research institutions but that do not involve industry partners. Relying on the rapid development of LCA as a scientific discipline and a greater recognition among industries and authorities [3], such networks will likely close this gap soon.
Title of study Global Regional (above country level) Local (incl. country level and lower) Total
LCA networks
Grey zone networks 3
9*
11
3
44
17
58
29
* A large number of global “grey zone networks” are fora, which aim at facilitating the informal exchange of knowledge in both LCA methodology and LCA application fields.
Table 2: Number of identified LCA networks and grey zone networks Investigating the geographic scale of each network (see Table 1), most of the LCA networks turn out to be country-level organizations (76%), while only 11 regional networks (19%) and 3 global networks were identified. The regional networks seem to be strongly related to the geographic location and its characteristics. The geographical distribution of regional networks such as CASE-LCA covering Central and Southeastern European countries, NorLCA covering countries from Scandinavia, or the Iberoamerican Life Cycle Network, which is the only network covering countries from different continents (Spain, Portugal and Latin America), illustrate that the formation of LCA networks is facilitated in the absence of cultural and language barriers among the different members.
600 Number of publications
Despite these uncertainties, the present mapping still enables to pinpoint relevant conclusions. It is thus found that the highest density of networks is observed for Europe, with Spain and Hungary being the most active countries. The Middle East, the African continent and Russia are regions with none or only few countries belonging to any network. This may reflect a lower activity within the LCA field in those regions. Alternatively, some of the networks may not have been captured in the search due to the lack of websites in the languages included in the search, or simply due to the absence of websites. In their assessment of LCA-related publications in the world, de Souza and Barbastefano [1] described those regions as having no or low number of publications (LCA publications were only reported for South Africa while no contribution was retrieved for Russia nor for Middle East countries). Therefore, although a more detailed web search using other languages than those already tested could be conducted to make the search more complete, it is not expected that the outcome would lead to identifying new LCA networks unless those are emerging ones.
Europe America Asia Oceania Africa
500 400
r = 0.963
300 200 100 0
0
5
10
15
20
25
Number of LCA networks
Figure 2: Relation between number of LCA networks (local or regional as identified in this study) and number of publications (data from de Souza and Barbastefano, 2011; [1]) in each continent. Solid line shows a linear regression fit to the data; r = Pearson correlation coefficient; the correlation is statistically significant at P
