Requirements on Consumer Information about Product ... - ANEC

Consumer Information about PCF
Applicability for orientation purposes
“LCA is already widely used for orientation purposes in environmental labelling. Thereby, an
LCA is carried out for a typical model of the product group to be labelled. The results give a
widely objective overview on the various environmental impacts across the life cycle, and
help to identify critical issues that have then to be addressed using production or use phase
indicators. Prominent examples are ecolabels and product ratings for cars: These labels and
ratings usually exclusively address environmental impacts in the use-phase and leave aside
impacts in production and end-of-life stage. This approach is justified with LCA-results showing
that the use phase constitutes for at least two thirds of the total environmental impacts
(Dauensteiner 2001, Gensch and Grießhammer 2004; Quack and Rüdenauer 2007).”
Prakash 2008
Due to the restricted focus of PCF on greenhouse gases, the situation is somehow different
to the general LCA approach: Results of a PCF can be used for orientation purposes as well
but they do not give an overview on the environmental performance of a product over its life
cycle. It only shows the very restricted view on climate impact. As the climate change issue is
of such a large relevance this approach is justified if it is somehow backed-up by a screening
of other environmental impacts. It must be prevented that a reduction in PCF on the one
hand leads to an increase of other significant environmental impacts on the other hand (e.g.
switch to electricity from nuclear power instead of fossil fuels). Secondly, it has to be avoided
that a product “looks good” but only due to its marginal PCF, leaving out the relevant impacts
in other impact categories (e.g. photochemical ozone creation potential, POCP).
4.2 Disadvantages of the LCA/PCF for environmental labelling
Current LCA-approaches do not account for unquantifiable impacts
“LCA is a purely quantitative tool that is based on numeric calculations of environmental
impacts across the life cycle. Nevertheless, there are certain environmental issues that cannot
be sufficiently expressed with quantitative figures. Although this is in some cases feasible
from a purely scientific perspective, the task to conduct this for a whole product life cycle
makes the issue too complex to be achieved within usual time and financial resources.
Additional problems arise with environmental topics that are rooted in the precautionary
principle: Topics like electromagnetic radiation and the release of many persistent organic
pollutants have in common that their precise impacts are not fully understood today. Nevertheless,
there is a broad agreement that the sheer likelihood of negative impacts in the future
is reason enough to reduce the release. Although some of these issues can be integrated in
LCA, the tool does not facilitate the interpretation of such issues and has therefore limited
scientific added-value.” Prakash 2008
14