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sustainability & ethics
and Chemistry (SETAC). That partnership resulted on
the establishment of the methodological structure of the
Life Cycle Assessment. In 1993, leaded by SETAC, the
standardization process started, with the publication
of the document “A Code of Practice”, and the LCA
methodology structuring. The development of the
environmental impact methodology CML, coordinated
by Helias Udo de Haes, allowed transforming the LCA
into a powerful tool for environmental evaluation of
product systems. SETAC officially joined the United
Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) in 2002,
helping the dissemination of the LCA methodology
around the world (KLÖPFFER, 2006).
Between 1997 and 2000, the ISO standards
series (14040, 14041, 14042 e 14043) were published
aiming to avoid the bad use of the LCA methodology
and establish rules for the harmonization of the studies.
In 2006, the standards were reviewed and grouped
in two only: ISO 14040 and ISO 14044. The ISO
14040 describes the principles and the LCA studies
structure and the ISO 14044 describes the essential
requirements and the rules to be used in those studies
(ISO, 2006a and 2006b). In 2009, the translation to
Portuguese of the ISO 14040 was published in Brazil
as ABNT ISO 14040 (ABNT, 2009).
The Life Cycle Assessment studies have allowed
increasing the debates related to the environmental
issues that used to be aspects such as energy
consumption, use of renewable or fossil resources,
recycling, biodegradation and/or composting only,
among others. Those studies give a new dimension to the
debates, hence they can integrate many environmental
aspects in one functional unity only associated to a
product or service. In its ideal form, that instrument
is founded in an environmental registering that starts
and ends in the nature. According to the standard ISO
14040, the term Life Cycle Assessment is defined
as the compilation and assessment of the inputs and
outputs and the potential environmental impacts of a
product system all over its life cycle. The product system
is defined by all its unitary processes with elementary
fluxes and of products that has one or more defined
function, which models the life cycle of a good.
The natural resources that are consumed
along every phase of the product life cycle (including
transportation) are registered to the given production
such as petroleum, water, log, land occupation, sand,
iron ore, bauxite, coal reserves etc. And, after the
sequence of productive phases for the given product
manufacturing, the remainder of the process in
relation to what it returns to the nature is registered,
in the form of solid residue, gas or liquid emission.
That product/nature assessment interface allows a
deeper understanding of the environmental cost for the
existence of any product (MOURAD et al., 2002).
The FIGURE 7.4 is a schematic representation
of the phases included in a package LCA, in which
ellipses represent the many unitary productive
processes involved in the package life cycle and the
trucks mean the phases of material transportation. It is
observed that the registering is initiated in the natural
resources consumed for obtaining the given products:
ore, petroleum, solar energy, carbon dioxide etc. In that
representation, for example, the phases for obtaining
the conditioned product have not been included, since
for this case, the study is limited to a package LCA.
The principles of the LCA methodology