Sustainability research guides

Life cycle analysis

Definitions

Daniel Goleman. Ecological Intelligence. Broadway Books: New York. 2009. p. 14

An industrial engineer's version of the deconstruction of stuff is called Life Cycle Assessment, or LCA, a method that allows us to systematically tear apart any manufactured item into its components and their subsidiary industrial processes, and measure with near-surgical precision their impacts on nature from the beginning of their production through their final disposal.

Healthy Building Network

Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) is a term used broadly to apply to any of a number of analytic techniques to evaluate the environmental impact of a material or a service throughout its life cycle from extraction or harvesting of raw materials through processing, manufacture, installation, use and ultimate disposal or recycling.

Sean McGinnis. Powerpoint slide: Green Engineering & Environmental Life Cycle Analysis at Virginia Tech.

Life Cycle Analysis (LCA): A method base on scientific data for analyzing and quantifying environmental impacts of products, processes, and systems over their entire life cycle.

Synonyms

Use these synonyms when keyword searching Addison and databases:

• life cycle analysis
• life cycle assessment
• life cycle enginering

Addison

Use the Subject search screen and search on the subject product life cycle - environmental aspects.

Full text ebook collections

Individual ebooks are all cataloged in Addison, so keyword and subject searches will find ebooks with broard coverage of LCA. Use the search functionality of these ebook sites to search the full text of their ebook collections for LCA topics.

CRC Engineering Handbooks Online from ENGnetBASE

Use the keyword or advanced search options to search the full text of all available ebooks in the system. Results are often one PDF per chapter.

Knovel Online Interactive Books and Databases

Searches across the contents of ebooks, numberical tables and figure, and databases of scientific information. Most results are returned as PDFs, often with one per chapter or section of an ebook.

Databases

Engineering Village

Engineering Village provides the following three databases:

• Compendex – broad coverage of many engineering fields
• INSPEC – more focused on electrical and computer engineering, as well as physics
• NTIS – government sponsored research i.e. DOE, DOD, EPA, DOT

CSA: Cambridge Scientific Abstracts

The CSA database interface allows for searching more than one CSA database simultaneously. Three major engineering related databases are listed here, but scanning the entire list for relevant databases for your research topic could prove useful

• Environmental Sciences and Pollution Management
• CSA Materials Research Database with Metadex
• Mechanical and Transportation Engineering Abstracts

CAB Abstracts from CABDirect

This database focuses primarily on agriculture-related topics, but contains many other related fields as well.

Websites

There are a multitude of LCA related pages on the web which Google will retrieve. Below is a selected list of sites that can be used as a starting point.

USA.gov

A centralized, comprehensive web site enabling searches of 50+ million web sites from both federal and state governments.

American Center for Life Cycle Assessment

A relatively new organization (2001) that provides this page with a wide range of LCA information.

Life-Cycle Assessment

This site from the United States Environmental Protection Agency provides information about LCA, as well as numerous links to LCA related sites.

European Commission

The European Commission is the executive branch of the European Union. This site provides an EU perspective on LCA.

Goodguide

Gives evaluations of health, environmental, and social impacts of products.