4. Areas of use for LCA

LCA is used in a wide variety of fields, which can be grouped into 3 categories according to interest: political, scientific or managerial.

• The political interest in using LCA to analyze anthroposystems is to identify and quantify pollution transfers in order to reduce or even eliminate them, with a view to respecting the principle of Sustainable Development in its environmental dimension. For example, a life-cycle stage may be very "clean" within its boundaries, while the upstream stage may be very resource-hungry and the downstream stage environmentally problematic. In such cases, LCA provides results that can be used to draw up and justify legal standards and regulatory thresholds, which generally result in resource savings or the substitution of relatively polluting substances. Major international bodies (UN, EU) have adopted the LCA...