The need to make life cycle analysis unbiased and representative outside the original context: set-up of two cases studies

This article deals with the important issue of having consistent average datasets available for Life Cycle Analysis. The question about whether or not a LCA on a specific case study could be sufficiently representative of other realities is examined, and solutions and analysis here suggested by authors go into deep about the essential role played by national and international databases. As a matter of fact, databases make a consistent amount of “secondary data” and information, collected in a specific geographic area, available to conduct LCA studies able of depicting the considered reality with unbiased results and considerations. These sets of information are useful both for “company specific LCA” intended to assess a specific production system, and for “industry average LCA” which aim is assessing a medium manufactor system in a specific geographic area. Hence, this article has the aim of showing a short cut of main technical problems which still need to be set down, going through two case studies which played the important role of leading the authors in facing these issues. The research cases concern environmental impacts assessment of food farming products, and have the objective of building a new innovative and multidisciplinar index for environmental, social and economic assessment, and of misuring the correlation between environmental impacts and social dynamics, too. Thanks to the research work, it has been underlined the need for our scientific society of making Regional LCAs in the sense of Italian LCA, which, to be unbiased, must be based on Italian collected data consistently averaged.