Host: The Institute of Life Cycle Assessment, Japan
The economic input-output (EIO) technique has played an essential role in the field of life-cycle assessment (LCA) in a so-called hybrid manner. In accordance with the classification of models of EIO-LCA of products by Joshi (2000, Journal of Industrial Ecology), however, the model that regards the product of interest as a new hypothetical industry sector has been used more widely than the model that disaggregates an existing sector in which the product of interest is aggregated. The former model may inappropriately ignore an indirect effect which is caused by the spread of the product. In this regard, I present a simulation study to show how large the ignored indirect effect is and then propose a simple method for obtaining the lower and upper bounds of estimated environmental emissions in the case where the ignored indirect effect is accounted for based on uncertain data.
