A fuzzy logic approach for the impact assessment in LCA

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is becoming an effective tool for evaluating the environmental impacts of a product. Companies find on LCA a good support when defining their environmental strategies, since it applies an overall view to detect those phases of the product life cycle where major environmental effects occur. However, applying strictly this methodology can be a costly, time-consuming process, and sometimes the company does not know the accurate data necessary to apply the LCA methodology. That is why it is necessary to develop simplified methods that are more suitable for small and medium-sized enterprises, SME. In this paper, a streamlined method is proposed, making use of fuzzy logic to avoid the need for in-depth environmental knowledge and extremely accurate data to carry out the assessment, thus making LCA more applicable to small and medium sized enterprises. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.