The Grand Objectives: A Framework for Prioritized Grouping of Environmental Concerns in Life‐Cycle Assessment

The goal of life‐cycle assessment (LCA) is to conduct an inventory of the flows of materials and energy attributable to an industrial product and then to calculate the impacts of those flows on the environment, over the entire product life cycle from premanufacture to end of 1ife. A related technique, streamlined life‐cycle assessment (SLCA), attempts to preserve the breadth of perspective in that approach while performing assessments more efficiently. A common failing of both techniques is that recommendations for actions to improve the environmental responsibility of products have rarely been related in an intellectually rigorous fashion to the environmental concerns they purport to ameliorate. In this article l propose that a framework for the way in which these relationships can be established is by a decision‐making process that begins with the “grand objectives,” the common consensus of the vital goals for the maintenance and improvement of life on Earth. The grand objectives lead to the identification of crucial environmental concerns, and those, in turn, to determining societal activities that need to be examined. Actions related to those activities can then be designed to contribute to the achievement of the grand objectives. If and when such a consensus is established, LCAs and SLCAs can be undertaken with confidence that the actions they recommend will serve broad societal goals.