Glossary

Legitimacy

A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) quantifies and assesses the emissions, resources consumed, and pressures on health and the environment that can be attributed to different goods or services over their entire life cycle. It seeks to quantify all physical exchanges with the environment, whether these are inputs in the form of natural resources, land use and energy, or outputs in the form of emissions to air, water and soil.

Source: Making sustainable consumption and production a reality. A guide for business and policy makers to Life Cycle Thinking and Assessment (European Commission, 2010)

https://eplca.jrc.ec.europa.eu/uploads/LCT-Making-sustainable-consumption-and-production-a-reality-A-guide-for-business-and-policy-makers-to-Life-Cycle-Thinking-and-Assessment.pdf

Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) seeks to identify possible improvements to goods and services in the form of lower environmental impacts and reduced use of resources across all life cycle stages. This begins with raw material extraction and conversion, then manufacture and distribution, through to use and/or consumption. It ends with re-use, recycling of materials, energy recovery and ultimate disposal (European Commission, 2010).

Life Cycle Thinking aims to prevent environmental issues before they damage occurs without transferring the problem from one system to another, for example to another production site (G.EN.ESI Education Centre)

Source:
1. European Commission, 2010: Making sustainable consumption and production a reality. A guide for business and policy makers to Life Cycle Thinking and Assessment
https://eplca.jrc.ec.europa.eu/uploads/LCT-Making-sustainable-consumption-and-production-a-reality-A-guide-for-business-and-policy-makers-to-Life-Cycle-Thinking-and-Assessment.pdf
2. G.EN.ESI Education Centre Introduction to Life Cycle Thinking
www.genesi-fp7.eu/education-centre.
2. Liu, L.