Abstract
The history of product-oriented environmental tools goes back more than twenty-five years. Amongst the first studies — not yet called LCA — was a study carried out in the United States in 1969 on behalf of Coca-Cola and another in 1974 in Germany on behalf of the German Ministry of Research (Oberbacher et al. 1974)1.
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Boustead (1996), Fink (1997) and Oberbacher et al. (1996) report on the history on LCA in several countries.
Most LCA researchers do not restrict the term “product” to material products, but also include processes and services.
IÖW carried out a survey together with the German BDI on the application of LCA some years ago (Grotz/Scholl 1996). Some of the results could be used for our current purposes.
In Sweden, the results of the Swedish Business Environmental Barometer were used. The Swedish Business Environmental Barometer is a questionnaire survey on environmental practice and opinions in industry carried out both in 1993 and 1995, and will be repeated every two years. It has been analysed here with regard to the occurrence of LCA. The survey has been directed at two groups of respondents: all 212 companies listed on the Swedish Stock Exchange (since 1993) and a random sample of companies (633) with more than ten employees (since 1995).
However, in Italy since the end of 1996, several new LCA studies have been carried out both by the companiesalreadyperforming LCA and by other companies.
For example, by the end of 1991 the American company Franklin Associates compiled about 70 studies, of which, however, only four are known. The OECD (1995, p. 39) stated that only 10% of the Franklin studies are available to the public & only 5% of the French consultancy Ecobilan. These figures were slightly modified; accordingly 30–60% of all LCA studies commissioned by companies are for internal use only (Smith et al. 1998, p. 29 ).
Results for Italy are unfortunately not available.
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© 2000 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Frankl, P., Rubik, F. (2000). Application of LCA in general. In: Life Cycle Assessment in Industry and Business. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-04127-7_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-04127-7_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
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