Regular application of LCA in industrial practice

The methodology of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has proved to be suitable to support industrial decision making in several case studies. Nevertheless the regular application of LCA in industrial practice is still uncommon. The major reason for this is constituted by the extensive demand of Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) data from the product life cycle, which is needed for the regular execution of LCA studies. In order to enable a better integration of LCA in industrial decision making this article outlines a concept for the use of data from Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) Systems for the calculation of LCI on a regular basis. The developed concept supports a regular publication of environmental product declarations based on ISO/TR 14025 (Type III).