Directly interested parties of sustainable development i.e. production companies and legislative instruments, must find LCA a quite powerful tool since today is maybe the only technique that can give sufficient quantitative information about environmental and economic consequences of production processes. From our work we realised that LCA is a breakthrough method for the management boards of companies with respect to the environmental and economical evaluation of the products they manufacture. Referring to the indirect parties i.e. the public, LCA can also be useful to understand the system of sustainable life by indicative values on material use and economic benefits. When deciding between two alternatives, LCA can help decision-makers compare all major environmental impacts caused by products, processes, or services. Adding life cycle assessment to the decision-making process provides an understanding of the human health and environmental impacts that is not considered traditionally when selecting a product or process. This valuable information provides a way to account for the full impacts of decisions, especially, those that occur outside of the site that are directly influenced by the selection of a product or process.

Production Companies 

In evaluation and policy-making of companies LCA can be used to supply information for evaluating policies that affect resource use and releases, to identify gaps in information and knowledge, and help establish research priorities and monitoring requirements. Furthermore it can be used to evaluate product statements of quantifiable reductions in energy, raw materials, and environmental releases. With LCA the companies can design curricula for training those involved in product, process, and activity design. In internal decision-making it can be the basis for comparing alternative materials, products, processes, or activities within the organization and to compare resource use and pollution information with those of other manufacturers. Training staff responsible for reducing the environmental burdens associated with products, processes, and activities, including product designers and engineers is another possible use of it.  In a line, life-cycle assessment helps companies to look at all aspects of their operations and integrate them into the overall decision-making process.

Legislative Instruments

For this category LCA can help to develop regulations on materials use and environmental releases where a comprehensive inventory and impact analysis have been conducted. It can also provide information to policy makers, professional organizations and the general public on resource use and pollution and substantiate product-related statements relating to energy, raw materials, and environmental releases.

Public

To our understanding LCA as a method is not still a mature system and it has a lot a problems, which we categorised them as external/internal and specific/non-specific respectively, to enable the readers to adapt easily to their variety and complication states. First we present the internal or inherent problems as those that we think are poorly formulated by defining LCA and we assign them as specific when they are relating to a specific code problem of the LCA methodology or non-specific in the case that they generally flaw the process outside the actual guideline kernel. After that external problems are presented as those affecting the deployment of the method to its best possible potential.

Specific

Coal and Scope Definition

For the current state of the system boundaries we found that there is a need to investigate the implications of different system boundary definitions and to develop appropriate solid guidelines. [We suggest the creation of a definite and clear set of practical rules for this part of the process].

Inventory Analysis

For the inventory we identified the absence of standardised allocation procedures for multiple processes. [Thus we think that practical rules are necessary to be established for on-going studies and a more systematic approach should be developed. The approach must take into account the different properties of the product: physical, practical and economic. A promising method might be to follow an established procedure, going from one principle to the next, when the preceding principle does not apply. Research is also needed to establish more precise practical rules for defining the systems, which will supply generic utilities and services].

Characterization

Here we identified another weakness of this phase namely the “equivalency factors”. [These we feel that must be further developed, with emphasis on regional and local impact categories]. One of the major bottlenecks is the question to which extent should geographical differences be established so that they could be taken into account for these categories, in respect to their environmental sensitivity. [Our recommendation is that any research yielded should be directed both at the sort term – aiming at the establishment of practical rules for immediate use (application together with the necessary data) – and, at the long term, which would seek to adopt a more fundamental approach].

Non-Specific

Inability to Benchmark Results

One of the major drawbacks, and the most important to our judgment, of LCA is the inability for someone to use the results effectively for large-scale sustainability comparisons. We believe that this drawback is maybe the one to be practically blamed about the poor LCA performance industrially. The method cannot be used, for what it should be able to offer pragmatically otherwise (i.e. to benchmark the recovered results), since that opportunity is lost due to the absence of a large benchmarking scale for thorough comparisons. Thus a source, for assessing findings, on similar sustainability studies is not available for parallelism. The absence of an updated/categorised-benchmarking database is forbidding essentially the analyst to judge upon the analysis results for their validity and robustness and to understand the actual effect they impose on the grater sustainability as similar products do. Due to the nature of the study, which allows the user to set their own system boundaries and impact categories, LCA study is only useful for carrying out a comparison study of two systems or products within the same system boundaries, and using the same impact categories. This equates that two products cannot effectively be compared if they have been examined using different studies, unless all variables of the LCA studies are identical. Of the limited data that there is available, there is some ambiguity between data from different sources for similar or identical materials therefore it is difficult to know which data to choose. This is one of the reasons why the LCA is effective only as a comparison tool of two or more products or systems within the same study, to ensure there is no ambiguity between data sources

[One of the possible solutions in order to maintain comparability among materials or products, to our view, is to initiate an absolute pack of specifications, which will help the designing party to make consistent assumptions, to define same boundary and scope conditions and to arrange for the same level of detail with other parties on the same area of analysis. Also ensuring functional equivalence and separating ends from means will help to eliminate implications of the building’s life cycle uncertainty and unpredictability].

Sustainable Metric Capacity

If the above drawback said to be of vital importance for the future exploitation of LCA, as a solid metric of sustainable actions, this is even more critical for the same reasons. The LCA procedure does not provide an overall answer to how sustainable a product is. For a product to be sustainable, it must show consideration to social, environmental and economic inputs. LCA can effectively be used as a tool for calculating the environmental impacts of a product. In an extended pattern, Life cycle cost analysis is a similar methodology to LCA (calculates costs over the useful life of the asset associated with the associated inputs), which eventually corresponds to the economic aspects of sustainability thus leaving outside the social aspects of the aforementioned trinity of values. Due to the format of the LCA procedure, no consideration is shown to the social aspects that are required for a product to be called “sustainable”; therefore LCA cannot be used today as an absolute measure of sustainability.

[Our obvious suggestion on the above problem is for a larger expansion of LCA so that it can cover those points that have been missed by the other two existing bodies.] 

Data Collection and Deployment

Data selection, validation and acquisition are huge obstacles in the development of the technique worldwide. Although in the last ten years a lot of attention has been drawn towards building secure and powerful databases our short experience of this system showed that still a lot of research is remaining to define better LCA databases. Problems regarding the availability, access and quality of data are at the core of all LCA studies and we expected from the beginning the more sophisticated the study is (as in our case) the greater the data problem.  Thus the LCA process ends up being finally a very time intensive process largely because of the data collection. We soon realised that the data required to carry out the LCA study was not readily available and was only located after a very thorough search. Due to the nature of the study, which examines all associated impacts from cradle to grave, then this obviously requires a lot of time. We also found that for some materials, the manufacturers were unwilling to release data, which is required for doing the LCA study. For example, when looking at impacts relating to manufacturing processes, particular manufacturers would not provide us with this data, even although they were involved in doing LCA studies of their own. This may be due to the fact that any company does not want to be seen to be having any detrimental effect (impact) on the environment during their manufacturing process.

[A possible solution to data deployment and acquisition could be to identify key issues that direct the data gathering process, so that life cycle assessment could really be possible in practice. Specific data problems are likely to occur for processes outside EU countries. One possible solution to that may reside in giving a formal advisory role within the working groups to relevant industrial associations. Also a central facility is needed to provide basic data for the inventory analysis concerning commodity materials, fuels and services (e.g. steel, concrete, wood, coal, oil, plastics, road transport etc). These data can then be used for life cycle assessment phase. To our understanding they should be delivered after a quality review prepared by a panel of LCA experts on behalf of the competent authority. This would encourage industry to provide improved, up-to-date data, while informing users about data quality. Government, industry, academia, consultants would be able to purchase data from this base and would be able to obtain life cycle assessment advise from the staff. This database would be the source or reliable data for developing and using worldwide ecological criteria.]

Loosen Guidelines

There is some dubiety over the integrity of the results due to the assumptions, which inevitably have to be made during such a complicated study. 

Degree of Guideline Malleability

We would say that, for relatively complex manufactured products, such as buildings, a full LCA is too costly, too time consuming, and too complex in its results, to be of practical value to designers and manufacturers.

The Cost and Time of gathering reliable LCA Data

Performing an LCA can be resource and time intensive. Depending upon how thorough an LCA the users wish to conduct, gathering the data can be problematic, and the availability of data can greatly impact the accuracy of the final results, as we have mentioned above. Therefore, sometimes it is important to weigh the availability of data, the time necessary to conduct the study, and the financial resources required against the projected benefits of the LCA. Exact illustrations of costs and times are difficult to provide as they can vary substantially from product to product. Indeed the difficulty of estimating such costs is itself a problem for companies planning on LCA - based developments. Companies that have established their own internal LCA research are generally reluctant to publicise the costs associated with such work [18]. Still some information is available and it can be quite instructive. 

Impact Results Complexity

The actual meaning of the results is inadmissible masked, since the level of information currently available to assess the results for their validity confines their interpretation. In many cases the difficulties and limitations of LCA for strategic planning - whether it be eco-design, business planning, or policy development - stem not from the costs and time but the complexity of the results. In some (ideal) cases an/ LCA will show a clear single dominant impact, which can be easily addressed. Unfortunately, for the rest of the cases, impacts are more usually spread over the different phases of the life cycle and over different environmental effects [19]. Relative impacts between, say, use and disposal or between the contribution to CO2 and overall energy efficiency (which can be associated with a range of other environmental effects), are often not sufficiently clear to provide direction for action. The unpalatable reality was that “fixing” one problem sometimes “worsening” another.

Lack of Diversity