Week 12 - Materials

For this stage of the Life Cycle Assessment, ISO 14040 requires the results of the inventory and the impact assessment to be evaluated with the aim of deriving conclusions and providing recommendations.  There are three phases of the interpretation stage:

1. identify of the critical parameters from the inventory and impact assessment (i.e which processes make the largest contribution to an indicator)
2. Assess completeness and data quality
3. Provide conclusions (including limits of applicability)

(Konig et al, 2010)

One of the disadvantages of the LCA is that technical, societal and economic matters are not addressed.