Session: LCA Methods

Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment at Regional Level
H. Scott Matthews,^*   Carnegie Mellon University
Y. Anny Huang,   Carnegie Mellon University

Planning and investment decisions at the regional and local levels have great impacts on people’s everyday life. Most environmental issues are experienced locally and are most effectively managed at regional or local levels. Various life cycle assessment (LCA) tools developed in the past decade have helped decision makers in industry and government alike to consider the life cycle impacts of project, products, and services. However, impacts throughout the supply chain may occur in different regions or states, but the standard process-based LCA as well as input-output LCA based on national economic model have not been able to effectively estimate the locations of impacts occurred elsewhere throughout the product’s supply chain. In recent research, the authors created a tool for visualizing the spatial distribution of life cycle impacts in the national Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment (EIO-LCA) model by applying regional multipliers to the national model. The regional or state multipliers are created for all production processes using publicly available data. The results of visualization inform EIO-LCA users about the regions or states that bear the most environmental burdens, including conventional air pollutants, greenhouse gas emissions, toxic releases, and energy consumption, due to certain economic activities.

In addition, the authors have developed environmental impact factors (i.e. environmental vectors in EIO-LCA background calculation) for conventional air pollutants that are specific to the industrial efficiency in the states of interest. The environmental impact factors are created using the National Emission Inventory, public data available from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. They can be used in customized regional EIO-LCA model to help inform decisions on regional or local scale. They can also be used to compare the production efficiency of industry among states for benchmarking environmental performance purposes.

Using these tools, decision makers can assess economic and environmental impacts of their projects, justify changes in operation and budgeting, estimate local or regional pollutant releases due to certain economic activities, and visualize spatial distribution of life cycle impacts throughout the supply chain of products and services.

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