Carsten Thoroe
Abstract
The objective of Life-Cycle-Assessment (LCA) is to evaluate the environmental burdens associated with a product, a process, or an activity by identifying and quantifying energy and material uses and resultant environmental releases during the products entire lifecycle. So far the international discussion on methodology and standardisation of LCA is dominated by aspects of the industrial production process; welfare aspects of renewable resources are highly neglected. The special benefits of forestry for the environment, the social benefits of forests, the carbon sink function of forest and wood products did not get access into the methodology of LCA yet. Foresters should join the discussion as long as it is in progress, they should make sure that such benefits will get access to national and international standards on LCA methodology and they should demonstrate its benefits by active ecobalancing of wood production.
Keywords: Life cycle assessment, forestry, production, standardization.
Introduction
Increasing awareness for environmental problems has raised national and international efforts in environmental policy making. Sustainability of economic and social development has become a high ranking goal, and it is one of the leading ideas of the Agenda 21, which has been agreed upon at the UNCED-Conference in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992. At a first glance, the idea of sustainable development seems to promise improved future conditions for products originating from sustainably produced renewable resources compared with those of non-renewable, exhaustible ones.
Sustainability of timber production has a long tradition in many European countries, especially in Germany. Therefore, a revival of the use of wood products may be expected which could lead to an improvement of the economic conditions for forest enterprises producing at a sustainable base. But such expectations should not be trusted too readily due to a number of reasons:
First, it should be kept in mind that the environmental image of wood and wood products is partly damaged due to the discussion about rainforest destruction in the tropics and due to negative impacts on the environment which are caused by certain forest management practices in a number of countries all over the world. There are some efforts for regaining market place credibility. Efforts to develop new and up-to-date forest management schemes are sometimes very ambitious from an ecological point of view. This may deteriorate the competitive position of wood products.
Second, it should not be ignored that some wood processing or wood preservation practices cause severe burdens for the environment. For judging the environmental effects of products, it is necessary to regard the whole life cycle of the product, literally from cradle to grave. Doing this is a main concern of Life-Cycle-Analysis (LCA), which will be discussed later in the paper in more detail. But for estimating future market positions for wood products it should be considered that in many industrial sectors strong efforts are being directed towards a reduction of adverse effects on the environment, which are caused by certain production processes. Efforts are also being made towards an improvement of the possibilities for an environmentally appropiate use and re-use of products. These efforts require extensive funds for research and development. The success or failure of these efforts will be a decisive element of the competitive power of products in the future. Such efforts are necessary in wood working industry, too. But the amounts of funds for research and development in forestry and forest industries are not very impressive.
Third, the increasing awareness of environmental problems has raised efforts of enterprises to use environmental arguments for marketing purposes. Not only the technical quality of a product itself, but also the environmental quality of the product and of the production process becomes a central aspect of marketing activities. There is a demand for "bio-" or "eco-"products which is met by the market. Labelling and certification activities have been promoted to give consumers information about environmental effects of products and production processes.
In Germany, for instance, the environmental label programme "Blue Angel" aims at ensuring consumers that specific environmental standards are being met by a product. In the EU, the "Eco-label" follows a similar approach. The International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has created international standards for quality management systems (ISO 9000) and has started negotiations to create standards of environmental mangement systems (ISO 14000).
All this is the background which must be taken into consideration when discussing activities of Life-Cycle-Analysis (LCA) and their importance for forestry and forest products industries. In the remainder of the paper, a short representation of the method of LCA will be given, and it will be refered to the current negotiations to create an international standard for LCA. It is tried to show why it is important for forestry and forest products industries to become more intensively engaged in this process. At the end of the paper, the conclusions will again take up some aspects of the possible future market position of wood and wood products.
Life-Cycle-Analysis
Methodology
During the last years, Life-Cycle-Analysis has been developed as an instrument for evaluating all environmental burdens associated with the production and use of a product, comprising its whole life cycle. LCA has to identify and quantify all uses (inputs) of energy and material as well as all resultant releases.
LCA is a method which can be used for several purposes, especially:
It is an ambiguous tool to approach environmental problems associated with the provision of goods and services. The procedure of a LCA can be divided into four phases:
Because of the several possible purposes of a LCA, its initial phase must contain a definition of the purpose and the scope of the study which has to be executed. Furthermore, the system boundaries of the study have to be described clearly in this initial part in order to ensure comparability with different studies about other products or processes.
In LCA all material and energy inputs shall be traced back to their extraction from their sources and all releases into the environment shall be taken into account. All these inputs and releases shall be registered in the Life Cycle Inventory. In order to make LCA feasible, decision rules and cut-off criteria are used to establish manageable system boundaries, and to limit subsequent data handling to those input/output data which can be made available and which are (or seem to be) relevant for the results. A methodological problem of Life-Cycle-Inventory is the allocation of inputs and releases to the products and to the residues. In principle, this is a problem similar to the one economists have with allocating costs of joint production.
The impact assessment phase of LCA is aimed at understanding and evaluating the magnitude and significance of environmental impacts based on the inventory analysis. The impact assessment is conducted within the confines of the goal, scope and objectives defined in phase one. The methodological and scientific framework for impact assessment is still being developed.
To bring transparency into the impact assessment phase, the resulting data from life cycle inventory are grouped together and sorted into a number of impact categories (general impact categories are for instance resource depletion, human health, or ecological impacts; specific impact categories are for instance global warming, acidification, or eutrophication).
For each of the selected impact categories a characterization is made based on scientific knowledge about environmental load-response-relationships. Due to insufficient scientific knowledge, there is some subjectivity inherent to the life cycle impact assessment. This subjective element is even stronger as the valuation of the results is concerned. The aim of the evaluation - as one element of the impact analysis - is to determine the significance of the results of the impact assessment, i.e., interpreting, weighting, and ranking the data produced from the inventory analysis. The assessment of the level of environmental disturbance is a subjective procedure and reflects social values and preferences of the analyst. Therefore, this element must be made transparent, and subjective factors and assumptions used in the assessment have to be justified and explained.
The last phase, the improvement assessment, has to address those questions which are posed in the goal definition. From the results of the impact assessment, conclusions have to be drawn for environmental improvements.
During the last years, various LCA studies have been published. Several of them are refering to products which compete with wood products (Frühwald 1995). Only few studies have regarded wood and wood products. Even these studies did concentrate on the wood products industries and on the use of the products; they have not regarded the field of forestry and forest production (Richter/Sell 1992). Up to now, LCA is a method mainly focussed on industrial production processes and products. Most LCA studies are restricted to industrial processes only. They do not include the process of raw material acquisition. For forestry and forest products, it is very important to include raw material acquisition and resource depletion into LCA.
The fundamental differences between raw material acquisition and industrial production should be adequately considered in LCA. This renders the task more difficult because the impacts of raw material acquisition on the environment are often extremely site specific, whereas those of industrial production processes are not. Impacts of industrial processes on the environment are mainly based on process-engineering and are mainly independent from the specific location. On the other hand, productivity of non-renewable raw material acquisition depends heavily on site conditions (e.g. richness of the deposit etc.), and the productivity of renewable raw material production is even more site specific because it is closely related to local climate, soil fertility, etc. (in agriculture as well as in forestry). Particular site conditions often require specific technical equipment and specific process-engineering, which affect the environment very invidually. According to this site dependence of raw material production, LCA studies about raw material provision are often valid only within a very limited geographical range.
In principle, a separate modul is needed for each raw material used in any production process. This modul would be representative for the process of raw material acquisition or production (if renewable) at each respective site. This would require an accounting system capable of following the specific flows of the raw materials from their origin to the following steps of the production process during the whole life cycle of a product. This seems to be absolutely impractical, yet. If it proves impractical to follow the specific flow of raw material in each case and to assess the site specificness, then the process of assessing raw material production would have to be standardized. Anyhow, such a standardization would contradict the site related nature of forestry, this being emphasized as a fundamental law of forest production by foresters and forest-scientists. But it should not be too difficult to convince even foresters, that looking at a standardized process of forest production in a LCA is still much better than completely omitting the roundwood production process from LCA. For integrating forest production into LCA, this process has to be standardized due to practical reasons, at least for geographical units.
Negotiations for International Standardization
Although there is a wide consensus about how to organize an LCA in general, there are a lot of different methodological approaches in detail. The results of an LCA study are highly dependend on the methodology used. In order to gain more comparability of LCA studies as well as to prevent a misuse of this instrument, the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) has established working groups which are developing an international standard on LCA (ISO/TC 207/SC5). It seems that such an LCA standard will be passed very soon, even though research in many fields of LCA is still at the very beginning.
Looking into the drafts of the ISO working groups for an LCA-standard, there are some reasons to suspect that in the ISO standard a methodology might be agreed upon which covers the environmental effects in a way not appropriate to the use and the processing of renewable resources (Frühwald 1995, Appendix).
According to these drafts, the process of biological production is not considered in detail. This neglection is defended by the following arguments:
- The biological production process itself is considered to be of minor importance for the production and the use of the bulk of industrial products,
These arguments do not seem convincing. For evaluating environmental impacts it is necessary to record all environmental burdens in a Life-Cycle-Inventory. That principle is generally agreed upon. Before starting with the inventory, it has to be decided which emissions will have to be registered. Furthermore, to be able to characterize a substance as harmful to the environment, knowledge is needed about its relevant impacts. This, in principle, is the task of the impact assessment. If the emission of a substance (like CO2) is interpreted as a burden, consequently a reduction of this environmental burden by fixing this substance in the biological growth process should be recognized in the inventory. Consequently this should be interpreted as a benefit. In Germany the word "ecobalancing" is often used in the framework of LCA. This term "balancing" expresses very well a main idea of what should be done in LCA: a balancing of all ecological effects, related to the whole life cycle of a product. If the relationship between a substance and its environmental damage is known, it should be possible to show the benefits of fixing this substance in the biological growth process, too. The use of renewable resources for instance releases CO2, which has been fixed during the preceding biological growth process and will be fixed again in the next. The use of fossile raw materials releases CO2, which has been fixed millions of years ago, but now increases the CO2-content of the atmosphere.
Furthermore, LCA generally focuses on flows. In principle it should register (in a modular manner):
Applying this principle, the single steps of the life cycle are analyzed simultaneously, although in reality they follow one another - in other words: time effects are not considered. Such a procedure is common in other analyses of forest production too, for instance in the national accounting system, but for LCA this would be insufficent. Considering only flows of substances, energy and elements would not allow to reflect changes in growing stock and sink effects.
Especially the carbon sink effect of forests is of great importance for the environment. This carbon sink effect can be extended by using wood products because then the natural decomposition of wood will be delayed. Considering the importance of this effect has gained much devotion in the international discussion of global warming; one should take care to register it in LCA. If it is not possible to complete the flow-accounting of LCA by a stock-accounting, specific effects should at least be considered by some additional registration. In the case of the CO2 effects of forest production and wood-products, a lot of information is available (Wegener 1994; Burschel/Kürsten/Larson 1994; Enquete-Kommission 1994).
Further, the draft proposal of the ISO working groups does not consider effects on landscape, biodiversity etc. This is another methodological aspect which may cause discriminatory effects of the results of LCA studies on wood and wood products. Forest production based on the principle of sustained yield is said to have beneficial effects to the environment, like protective effects on soil, atmosphere, water etc. While these effects of biological production are beneficial to the environment, the acquisition of non-renewable raw material often causes severe interference with the environment. Striking examples can be shown for mining: destruction of natural groundwater reservoirs, destruction of the landscape, etc. A standard argument for cutting-off these effects in LCA is a lack of methods for measuring such effects. But in order to assess the environmental quality of goods and services, all relevant environmental effects should be registered and should be valued adequately, as stated before. If they are not, the results will be severely biased. The lack of empirical data describing the environmental benefits of forest production is often deplored (Bergen et al. 1993). The requirement of this kind of data completing the picture of LCA should give additional impetus for forest research in the future.
Conclusions
LCA is an instrument which can be used and which is actually used for different goals and in different manners. To avoid misuse, there are activities at national and international level to standardize LCA (Frühwald 1995). Those who are involved in this decision making process of standardization have to be convinced that it is important to take care of the specific problems of raw material production or acquisition in LCA. Forestry researchers have to demonstrate how this could be done as far as round wood production is concerned. The increasing awareness for environmental problems has raised criticism about certain forest management practices. There are efforts for regaining a positive environmental image of wood products. Within this context, standards for forest management are under development which aim at a certification scheme for "well managed" forests (Upton 1995).
So far, LCA should be separated from such certification schemes, because the assessment criteria of certification programmes are not consistent with those of LCA. The requirements of what has to be registered in an LCA-modul "forest production", as a first link of the total LCA chain, are determined by the claims and possibilities of the subsequent links of that chain.
As soon as LCA will have become standardized, it might be a task for the future to harmonize the criteria catalogues of life cycle assessment and certification schemes for forest management.
Standards for forest management practices are already included into eco-labelling schemes of products. To give an example: the European Commission has published regulations establishing criteria for the eco-labelling of toilet paper (Reg: 94/924/EC) and kitchen paper rolls (Reg: 94/925/EC); these regulations include forest management (as an environmental effect). They require the use of recycled fibre and fibre from forests which are managed in a way consistent with environmental standards. Presently, these EU eco-label rules provide only a vague definition of forest management criteria, and they fail to allow explicitly for independent inspection of forest management activities. But they already contain rules for future handling: "At the end of a three-year period this decision will be revised in the light of developments concerning operational guidelines and policies for forest management elaborated in international fora".
In many European countries which are proud of their long tradition of forest production at a sustainable base, forestry is now running the risk of losing competitiveness. This takes place in a time of increasing environmental awareness. Reacting to the international proscription of destructive forest management practices, which is forced by non-governmental-organizations, forest certification schemes are being developed, especially in those countries which are most hit by the criticism. If such schemes found a wide acceptance in the markets and if they were included into eco-labels for products, European forestry would be forced to establish such certification schemes itself. Large scale forestry would be able to meet such requirements in the process of eco-auditing, as it is under preparation in the ISO-negotiation without severe problems. But at least for small scale forestry it would be very costly to meet specific management requirements and empass the respective tests. Therefore, small scale forestry would be well advised to prepare organizational solutions to meet the requirements of the forest management standards at a cooperative level.
Forestry and forest products industries have paid too little attention to what is going on in the fields of eco-orientated management and marketing. It might probably not be sufficient only to loosely refer to some beneficial effects of wood production at a sustainable base, if we attempt to develop a positive market image and if we try to convince consumers, traders, architects, or other decision makers of the advantages of wood. A future environmental image must be based on reliable figures of the environmental effects of the production and use of products during their whole life cycle. Such figures will be of decisive influence on consumer behavior as well as on environmental legislation and regulations. Finally, they will help to get access to public funds for research and developement.
Outside the sectors of forestry and forest industry, there are lots of efforts for gaining such figures and to use them for marketing purposes. It is a challenge for forestry and forest products research to keep step with these efforts and to participate in the development of methods. Future competitiveness of products will depend on their environmental quality, not the quality which is claimed but that one which can be proved.
References
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OE Nov 21, 1996