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Impact Categories (IC)

The impact categories (ICs) represent environmental issues of concern to which LCI results may be assigned. The ICs selected in each LCA study have to describe the impacts caused by the products being considered or the product system being analysed. The selection of the list of ICs has to fulfil several conditions (Linfors et al., 1995):

• The overall recommendation regarding the choice of ICs is to include all the ICs for which international consensus have been reached;
• The list should not contain too many categories;
• Double counting should be avoided by choosing independent ICs; and
  
• The characterisation methods of the different ICs should be available.

Some baseline examples considered in most of the LCA studies are illustrated in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1: Baseline Examples

¹ PDI/ADI Predicted daily intake/Aceptable daily intake
² PEC/PNEC Predicted environmental concentrations/Predicted no-effects concentrations
³ IPCC Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
⁴ WMO World Meteorological Organization
⁵ EUSES European Union System for the Evaluation of Substances
⁶ UNECE United Nations Economic Commission For Europe
⁷ RAINS Regional Acidification Information and Simulation
⁸ CARMEN Cause Effect Relation Model to Support Environmental Negotiations
⁹ ADP Abiotic depletion potential
¹⁰ GWP Global warming potential
¹¹ ODP Ozone depletion potential
¹² HTP Human toxicity potential
¹³ AETP Aquatic ecotoxicity potential
¹⁴ TETP Terrestrial ecotoxicity potential
¹⁵ POCP Photochemical ozone creation potential
¹⁶ AP Acidification potential
¹⁷ EP Eutrophication potential

As there is no international agreement on the different approaches regarding ICs, different methods are applied in current LCAs. Moreover, some studies do not analyse all the ICs described in the previous table, while others use more than the previous impact categories mentioned.


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