Volkswagen slimLCl: a procedure for streamlined inventory modelling within life cycle assessment of vehicles

One of the key prerequisites of environmentally-friendly product design is a quantitative assessment of the environmental profile of product design options. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a tool for evaluating the environmental performance of goods and services over the whole life cycle. Yet, the effort involved remains one major obstacle for its wide-spread use. It is well-known that collecting and processing the relevant data is the most time-consuming part while conducting an LCA study of complex systems. It is possible to reduce the workload significantly by automating these process steps, which also offers advantages in terms of LCA quality.