Development and applicability of life cycle impact assessment methodologies

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is an environmental management tool, which can be used to evaluate the impact of a product, a system, or an activity on the environment. LCC is the concrete application of the LCA in its economic aspect. However, the LCA and the LCC are not enough to evaluate impact on the environment. Thus, S-LCA comes up, which focuses on the social impact of human activities. This paper mainly introduces the development (in Section 5.1), definition, goal, classification, and framework (in other sections, respectively) of LCIA. The relationship of LCA, LCC, and S-LCA is introduced first. In the following sections, the LCA, LCC, and S-LCA are described in detail. Section 5.4 introduces the difference and similarity between LCA and S-LCA, while Section 5.5 looks at the theory, the practice, and the existing problems of the LCSA, along with a summary of three life cycle assessment methods.