Goals, Strengths and Limitations Governing the Use of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in Food and Agriculture

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a method to identify all the inputs and outputs necessary to make a product and quantify the associated environmental and socioeconomic impacts.

In its simplest form, the LCA method describes the inputs (e.g. energy, materials, and resources) to a process and all the resulting outputs including the emissions and losses to the environment. LCA provides a modeling framework to link all processes together such that the sum of the inputs and outputs of all involved processes are included. LCA provides a system perspective that considers a product’s life cycle and quantifies the relevant impacts caused by it.