REVIEW PAPER
New Direction of Development in Environmental
Life Cycle Assessment
A. Lewandowska*, Z. Foltynowicz
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Faculty of Commodity Science; Poznan University of Economics; al. Niepodległości 10, 60-967 Poznań; Poland
Pol. J. Environ. Stud. 2004;13(5):463-466
KEYWORDS
ABSTRACT
The Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method is widely used to assess the environmental impacts generated
during the entire life cycles of products. The traditional process-based LCA (P-LCA), however, has
some weaknesses. One of them is incompleteness resulting from the omission of environmental loads on
the higher upstream orders of product system. This problem is called “truncation error.” There are some
relatively new initiatives to combine the conventional P-LCA with the economic Input Output Analysis
(IOA) in one general approach defined as a hybrid LCA. It allows solving different problems, even those
which seemed to be unsolvable until now.