Integrated economic and environmental assessments through activity-based life-cycle assessments

Assessment integration becomes more and more important as companies must handle increasingly complex issues. Traditionally, cost management, environmental management and design have been separated. Here, we present a assessment system that gives decision support with respect to both management and design; costs and environmental impact. The system is implemented based on the activity-based life cycle assessment (LCA) method. Activity-based LCA is an extension of activity-based costing as it handles costs, energy consumption and waste generation under the presence of uncertainty. In this paper we discuss how an activity-based LCA system has been implemented in two very different situations and the associated results. We believe that activity-based LCA would provide the electronics industry similar decision support that it gave in the two case studies presented here