Improve Environmental and Economic Performance with Streamlined Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA)

Streamlined Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA) is a pre-regulatory exercise that analyzes industrial processes and products to assess efficacy of existing production efforts and identify priorities for enhancing triple bottom line performance for product lines. SLCA includes aspects of standard Risk Assessment, Life Cycle Risk Assessment (LCRA), and Life Cycle Analysis (LCA) methodologies. It also draws upon technical understanding of environmental management, health risk assessment, industrial ecology, energy management and real estate and business planning. Importantly, SLCA offers an effective high-level screening of key product design criteria that focuses subsequent deeper assessments, allowing for low cost and rapid product assessments built on LCA principles [1]. This process can be especially useful when applied to nanomaterial product development since nanomaterials are not yet widely regulated and their impacts have not yet been widely studied. However the framework is effective for screening potential impacts and risks of various sectors at both the facility and individual product level.