ساخت بسیاری از LCA ها در پروژه های فنی درون سازمانی "تحقیق و توسعه"

In technical Research and Development (R&D) projects, a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of the technology under development is sometimes carried out. Particularly in inter-organisational R&D projects, the roles of LCAs tend to be unclear and arbitrary, and as a consequence, LCA work is not adequately designed for the needs of the project. There is a need for research on how to choose an appropriate role for LCA in such projects and how to plan LCA work accordingly. We have identified some possible roles of LCA in inter-organisational R&D projects and used experiences from LCA work in different such projects to identify four project characteristics that are decisive for what roles the LCA can have. The project characteristics are: (i) the project's potential influence on environmental impacts, (ii) the degrees of freedom available for the technical direction of the project, (iii) the project's potential to provide required input to the LCA, and (iv) access to relevant audiences for the LCA results. We discuss how evaluation of these project characteristics can help project commissioners, project managers and LCA practitioners to deliberately choose appropriate roles of LCA in inter-organisational R&D projects and plan projects for efficient use of LCA.

In technical Research and Development (R&D) projects, Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) are sometimes carried out on the technology under development. For inter-organisational R&D projects funded, partly or fully, through publicly funded R&D programmes, such as the European 7th Framework Programme, there is sometimes even a requirement to conduct an LCA (Tilche and Galatola, 2008). However, according to our experiences as LCA practitioners in such projects, requirements or recommendations on the exact roles of LCA are seldom provided. The topic of this paper is how to clarify the roles of LCA in such projects, and thereby improve project planning for utilising the full potential of LCA for assessing environmental impacts and influence technology development and decision-making.

In this paper, we have used our experiences as LCA practitioners in inter-organisational technical R&D projects (in particular five specific ones) for identifying and describing project characteristics which are decisive for the roles LCAs can have in such projects. Thus, real cases were used to generate theory. The potential use of this theory in practice was then illustrated by a discussion of how its application could have improved the planning in one of the studied projects. As noted in Section 2, others' experiences will be necessary to test and discuss the usefulness and transferability of the generated theory. Primarily, we recommend application in contexts similar to the projects studied in this paper, i.e. publicly funded inter-organisational technical R&D projects. However, there are most certainly findings that can be valuable also in other contexts. As our main experiences are limited to a few of the described LCA roles and to projects of similar scope (e.g. in terms of financial scope and technology areas), it would be particularly valuable if the findings were tested in other project scopes and in projects in which LCA has other roles. Furthermore, research is warranted to find out under what circumstances other assessment tools are more suitable than LCA for fulfilling certain roles, and on whether different proposed methodologies for screening or simplified LCAs are better suited for certain roles than others.