Product and Policy Life Cycle Inventories with Market Driven Demand: An Engine Selection Case Study

This paper introduces consequential life cycle assesment with market driven demand (LCA-MDD) to permit endogenous estimation of economic effects that are important in evaluating the environmental characteristics of product and policy design options. While the derivation of a computational LCI-MDD framework is shown to be straightforward, a major challenge is appropriately managing and communicating the uncertainties. To better understand and explore these uncertainties, this paper develops a case study that estimates the life cycle greenhouse gas emissions associated with selecting an engine for a mid-sized vehicle. A comparison is made between extrapolating a reference LCI model and employing LCI-MDD.