Sustainable Development and Society - GSA

Sustainable Development and Society
current GNP per capita, using multinational
input/output LCA models. Process
LCA databases can be augmented with
economic data as well. The only need is to
obtain and record, for each process, the
economic value of the process output. This
can be done when gathering and using new
and existing LCI database data on prices.
Step 2: Including Socio-economic
Pathways in LCIA
Step 1 shows how life cycle inventory
analysis can be augmented to include
economic output data in the supply chain of
a product. The next step is to develop a
model capturing the relationship between
life expectancy and per capita GDP. 7 We
arrive at an estimate for the number of life
years saved due to an increase in per capita
GDP through an equation that expresses a
change in life years as a function of a
change in total economic output, or GDP,
for a given country. “Characterization
factors” can be used together with the
economic inventory data to compute lifeyears
of impact through the “green arrow”
socio-economic pathways of Figure 1.
These life-years of health benefit can be
compared with the pollution-related life
years of damage to compute a more
complete estimate of the health
consequences of product life cycles.
Illustrative Application
Applying this method, we can estimate the
health consequences of pollution in the
total (global) supply chain and compare
them with the health consequences of
increased economic activity. LCA, as
previously noted, provides information
about impacts on at least three separate
areas of concern: human health, ecosystem
health, and resources. Our present focus
on the human health endpoint reflects the
fact that we are adding a new impact
pathway to this endpoint, and is not meant
to imply that human health is the only
important endpoint in LCA.
The model can show the regional
distribution of the economic activity in the
supply chain of a product, and most
importantly, the impacts upon health, as we
show in our study of health consequences
of pollution in the global supply chain of
Dutch electricity. Comparing these impacts
with the health consequences of increased
economic activity, we found that
approximately two-thirds of the total
economic activity stimulated by the entire
supply chain occurs within the Netherlands;
20% occurs in other OECD countries, and
less than 10% reaches non-OECD
countries. Although the fraction of supply
chain economic activity reaching
developing countries is small in this
example, we found that the fraction of
supply chain development impacts upon
health was expected to be very large.
The expected distribution of health impacts
of pollution is not too dissimilar from the
expected distribution of economic activity.
Our modeling approach captures the
different mix of processes and emission
factors for the different regions as
contained in the life cycle inventory
database of processes.
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