Methods for Managing Uncertainty in Material Selection Decisions: Robustness of Early Stage Life Cycle Assessment

Utilizing alternative materials is an important tactic to improve the environmental performanceof products. Currently a growing array of materials candidates confronts today’s product designer. While life-cycle assessment (LCA) methods provide quantitative input into this selection decision, their implementations are evolving and disparate. The goal of this paper is to explore several major analytical variations of LCA implementations and the implications of these variants across a range of application contexts. Specifically, this paper examines analytical variations in valuation method and treatment of recycling by exploring allocation methods that affect product end-of-life. Case studies across a range of materials are presented, including materials that exhibit a spectrum in variation of environmental performance and material degradation between primary and secondary applications. Preliminary results indicate that the choice of analytical method can have real impacts on individual metrics and there are sets of analytical variation over which strategic results are strongly affected.