Consistent normalization approach for Life Cycle Assessment based on inventory databases

The process-based life cycle assessments (LCA) of goods and services are calculated using a bottom-up approach related to a functional unit. However, this does not provide any information regarding the scale of the environmental impacts. Therefore, the normalization allows to relate the impacts to a reference system (specific countries, regions or even the whole world). These references are usually obtained from top-down approach. The different data sources introduce inconsistencies on results and raise doubts on their adequacy and representativity. This paper proposes a novel approach for determining the data for the reference in order to ensure consistency about boundaries, data sources and modelling hypotheses describing the system. For this purpose, normalization is applied as an expression of the result relative to the average component of the reference system, instead of the sum of all the components. The reference values are determined from the geometric means of the datasets of the inventory database, used for assessing the studied systems. The exemplary application to the ecoinvent databases provides normalization references for 878 versions of the impacts categories listed by ecoinvent and for the 2077 involved substances. For eight impact assessment methods, the results are compared with 16 normalization sets from the literature and point out highly significant correlations. (C) 2019 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.