Conclusions

The book’s main title ‘Perspectives in Life Cycle Impact Assessment’ had been chosen because of the many meanings in which the concept of perspectives is appearing in and made use of in this book: The LCA-perspective of the world: LCA has a very special view of the world. Its aim is to reduce the environmental damages per service gained from products, i.e., to improve the environmental efficiency of the processes in the technosphere. But in trying to do so, hardly any temporal and spatial resolution is provided, i.e., past, present, and future impacts are compressed and treated as if they would occur today and spatial differentiation is avoided by assuming a unit world approximated in our case by average parameter values for the whole of Western Europe. This way of dealing with time and place enables the tool to analyse environmental interventions of product systems and their impacts over the whole product life cycle.