Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a process to evaluate the environmental burdens associated with a product, process, service, or activity by identifying and quantifying energy, materials usage, and environmental releases, assessing the impact of those, and evaluating and implementing opportunities to affect environmental improvements.
This MIT Professional Education course serves as a starting point for conducting a life cycle analysis (LCA), in accordance with the methods and policies defined by the International Standardization Organization (ISO). Information surrounding the life cycle of a product, process, service, or activity is useful for making decisions about design, policy, acquisition, and corporate strategy while integrating sustainability into your organization's practices.
In the Life Cycle Assessment course, you will gain knowledge in collecting data from products and processes as well as:
- Learn to define the objective and scope of a LCA
- Collect primary data from inventories and secondary data from database
- Quantify the environmental impacts of products, using various impact assessment methods
- Interpret the results of an LCA through the prism of uncertainty
- Support the decisions using an LCA