Session: LCM & LCA Education

Teaching Life Cycle Analysis As An Interdisciplinary Undergraduate Engineering Course
Sean P. McGinnis,^*   Virginia Tech Green Engineering Program

Environmental Life Cycle Analysis (ENGR 3134) is a stand-alone upper level undergraduate class taught as part of the Green Engineering Program at Virginia Tech. This multidisciplinary program strives to work across all 12 College of Engineering departments to expose students to the environmental impacts of engineering practice. Environmental Life Cycle Analysis is one of two required core courses for an 18-credit (6 courses) Green Engineering minor.

The class content covers a wide range of topics including each of the typical life cycle phases and the main steps for completing an LCA for products, processes, or systems. Particular attention is focused on carefully defining the project boundaries and assumptions as well as the collection and assessment of inventory input/output data since most undergraduate engineering students have little practice in these critical skills. LCA concepts which prove difficult for the students to understand clearly include functional units, normalization, and weighting.

Pedagogical challenges in the LCA class content include the following balances: (1) model simplicity vs. complexity; (2) coverage of background material vs. specific examples across disciplines; and (3) individual work vs. group projects. Commercial LCA software and several internet resources are utilized to aid students in working through real LCA examples, but these have a variety of issues which must be addressed to ensure a good environment for students to learn the skills to use LCA appropriately. LCA case studies are interesting and engaging from the students’ perspective, but are often either too simple or too complicated for an optimum learning experience. Case studies which show LCA used as an iterative design tool are need to show the power of LCA beyond comparisons, however, few appropriate examples of this use of LCA have been found. Finding ways to collaborate with the LCA community to leverage its experience and expertise has the potential to signficantly improve the teaching and learning of this subject at the college level.

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