Environmental life cycle assessment is often thought of as cradle to grave and therefore as the most complete accounting of the environmental costs and benefits of a product or service. However, as anyone who has done an environmental life cycle assessment knows, existing tools have many problems: data is difficult to assemble and life cycle studies take months of effort. A truly comprehensive analysis is prohibitive, so analysts are often forced to simply ignore many facets of life cycle impacts. But the focus on one aspect of a product or service can result in misleading indications if that aspect is benign while other aspects pollute or are otherwise unsustainable. This book summarizes the EIO-LCA method, explains its use in relation to other life cycle assessment models, and provides sample applications and extensions of the model into novel areas. A final chapter explains the free, easy-to-use software tool available on a companion website. (www.eiolca.net) The software tool provides a wealth of data, summarizing the current U.S. economy in 500 sectors with information on energy and materials use, pollution and greenhouse gas discharges, and other attributes like associated occupational deaths and injuries. The joint project of twelve faculty members and over 20 students working together over the past ten years at the Green Design Institute of Carnegie Mellon University, the EIO-LCA has been applied to a wide range of products and services. It will prove useful for research, industry, and in economics, engineering, or interdisciplinary classes in green design.

Knowledge-Based Process Planning for Construction and Manufacturing describes a knowledge-based system architecture that is used to develop process planning systems called PLANEX. This book explains that PLANEX is a domain-independent, knowledge-based process planning system architecture. Starting from a description of the physical artifact to be constructed or manufactured, PLANEX generates the set of activities used to create the artifact. These activities, with their required resources, are linked into a process planning network which can be used in project scheduling or management. This text also reviews the concepts, requirements, and resulting architecture of PLANEX, including detailed descriptions of applications of the system in construction and manufacturing. This publication is recommended to engineers, architects, and specialists interested in construction and manufacturing process planning.

The mix of electricity consumed in any stage in the life cycle of a product, process, or industrial sector has a significant effect on the associated inventory of emissions and environmental impacts because of large differences in the power generation method used. Fossil-fuel-fired or nuclear-centralized steam generators; large-scale and small-scale hydroelectric power; and renewable options, such as geothermal, wind, and solar power, each have a unique set of issues that can change the results of a life cycle assessment. This article shows greenhouse gas emissions estimates for electricity purchase for different scenarios using U.S. average electricity mix, state mixes, state mixes including imports, and a sector-specific mix to show how different these results can be. We find that greenhouse gases for certain sectors and scenarios can change by more than 100%. Knowing this, practitioners should exercise caution or at least account for the uncertainty associated with mix choice.