Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment

Definition

Economic Input-Output Life Cycle Assessment (EIO-LCA) is a methodology for assessing environmental impacts associated with all the stages of the life cycle of a commercial product, process, or service. The methodology involves use of aggregate sector-level data on how much environmental impact can be attributed to each sector of the economy and how much each sector purchases from other sectors

Usage

EIO-LCA enables converting the expenditures by a company in a given industry sector into an average amount of carbon emissions. Such analysis can account for long chains (for example, building an automobile requires energy, but producing energy requires vehicles, and building those vehicles requires energy, etc.), which somewhat alleviates the scoping problem of process LCA

Issues and Challenges

EIO-LCA relies on sector-level averages that may or may not be representative of the specific subset of the sector relevant to a particular product and therefore is not suitable for evaluating the environmental impacts of products. Additionally the translation of economic quantities into environmental impacts is not validated