Life cycle impact assessment and risk assessment of chemicals — a methodological comparison

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Risk Assessment (RA) are two different tools in environmental management. This article identifies harmonies, discrepancies, and relations between the two tools exemplified by the RA principles of the European Commission (EC) and the LCA method, Environmental Design of Industrial Products (EDIP), developed in Denmark, respectively. A very important feature of LCA is the relative assessment due to the use of a functional unit. RA, on the other hand, is an absolute assessment, which requires very specific and detailed information on e.g. the exposure conditions. It is concluded that the conceptual background and the purpose of the tools are different, but that there are overlaps where they may benefit from each other and complement each other in an overall environmental effort.