[GreenYes] speaking of calculators

["Marjorie J. Clarke, Ph.D." <mclarke@no.address>]

Are there no calculators yet that allow for product lifecycle
calculations (LCA)?  It's most disheartening if true.  I
remember co-authoring that first tome on how to put together (what items
would be included in) multi-media impacts of product lifecycle
inventories (SETAC, Smugglers Notch, 1990) before EPA even started its
work on the subject.  It took 54 of us, a pretty amazing
international group, a week to put this volume together and point out
that it would be the first of 3 volumes (2nd being how to assess value to
the items in the inventory, reducing apples, oranges and pinenuts to one
common denominator, 3rd being how to retool production to reduce /
eliminate product lifecycle impacts).   I do know that Susan
Thorneloe at EPA has been working on this for many years.  I don't
think she has been addressing reuse or prevention much, concentrating
mostly on landfilling and incineration.  Not sure what she's done in
recycling/composting.

Related to this, I've found a need recently for figures on upstream
impacts of production.  I've heard this figure most recently to be
70% of the total, but there was no reference with that (and I suppose it
varies quite a bit depending on factors like where the extraction,
refining, processing, manufacturing etc take place and how efficient all
these are).  The reason for the interest is to try to follow up on
the piece I got published in the Gotham Gazette recently:
> > http://www.gothamgazette.com/article/Sustainability%20Watch/20080421/210/2500
where I pointed out that it's inaccurate to
assess New York City's carbon footprint to exclude not only the
environmental impacts of waste that we export out of NYC borders (which
is almost 85%), but also the carbon (and all the other pollution and
resources) associated with production of all the products and packaging
that we import to NYC to satisfy demand and consumption.  If every
municipality counted their footprint this way, small logging and mining
towns, manufacturing towns, etc would have huge footprints due, almost
entirely, to the demand by others outside the town.  All the
transportation links between towns would not be assigned to anyone. 
(I've long thought that environmental impact assessments of solid waste
plans should quantify and take the impacts from collection routes and
export routes into account and compare plans based primarily on export to
alternative plans where much of the prevention, reuse, recycling, and
composting infrastructure and activity were located in town or
nearby.)   Has there been work to address these points, or is
this something we need to press EPA and others to do?

Maggie Clarke, Ph.D.
www.MaggieClarkeEnvironmental.com
Environmental Scientist, Educator
mclarke@no.address
New York City