Introduction of Life Cycle Management to Organisations. LCA And Other Supporting Tools
- The idea of assistance of different tools in introduction of Life Cycle Management of products and services to the organizations in Poland and other Central and Eastern European countries is presented in this paper. First, Total Quality Management, ISO 9001 and ISO 14001 standards are analyzed as a tools which could support this process, but special attention is paid to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). According to environmental management systems scheme organisations of all kinds are concerned to achieve and demonstrate the sound environmental performance and they have to establish and maintain the procedures for examining and assessing the environmental effects of their activities, products or services. Among the best in this field methods is just LCA. It is the process of evaluating the environmental effects by identifying and quantifying the environmental loads or interventions, i. e. the amount of energy and raw materials used and the amount of emissions and wastes released into the environment. In this paper the goals of LCA are listed and main applications are presented.