Life Cycle Assessment has become a popular approach for evaluating the environmental impact of products and services. Traditional LCA mainly focuses on emissions and their impact throughout the life cycle. Consumption of some nonrenewable resources and land use are also sometimes included in the results, albeit in a variety of units. End-point impact assessment methods combine these results, but are often controversial due to their reliance on subjective valuation. Other life cycle approaches include energy analysis, which only accounts for nonrenewable energy use and has been popular for the analysis of energy processes and transportation fuels. Most existing methods ignore the role of ecosystem goods and services, which are the very resources that are crucial for sustainability. Another shortcoming of conventional LCA is that the necessary inventory data about emissions and impact are often not available for emerging technologies and at early stages of decision making.

This presentation will describe a fundamentally different approach to LCA that accounts for the contribution of ecosystem goods and services to industrial activity (natural capital). This “Ecologically-Based LCA” or EcoLCA accounts for inputs from nature such as water use from different sources, soil erosion, land use, pollination services, fish, wind, sunlight and bio-geo-chemical cycles. Other resources such as minerals and fossil fuels are also included. Such information is available in diverse units of mass, quantity or energy, which are difficult to combine and highly multivariate. Methods are proposed for characterizing and categorizing this information in a few categories such as ecosystem goods, ecosystem services, renewable, nonrenewable etc. These mid-point categories may be further combined to yield end-point indicators. Various physical methods such as mass, energy, cumulative exergy and emergy are explored for the proposed categorization. If data for a conventional LCA is available, it can also be combined with the proposed approach.

An input-output model of the United States is developed based on the proposed approach. This model is related to previous work by Ukidwe and Bakshi (2007), but consider a much larger range of ecological inputs in many different units. Software for using this model is being developed and will be demonstrated via applications to typical LCA problems such as comparison of paper versus plastic, different types of building materials, and fuels. Use of this approach for evaluating emerging technologies will also be demonstrated.