Life Cycle Analysis Tool Essay

People, since the past years, have been slowly but surely realizing the impacts of commission and or omission of certain actions on the environment and how it contributes to the worldwide phenomenon that is climate change. What makes this worldwide phenomenon eye and attention-catching is the fact that it has already caused the loss of thousands of lives and billions of dollars’ worth of property losses and damages all around the world. Life-cycle assessment is a technique that centers on the process of assessing the impacts (i.e. environmental impacts) of a certain product from the stage that it was produced or manufactured down to the stage where it will have to be disposed.
The technique of analyzing a product’s lifecycle is based on the idea that all products have a certain lifecycle and that most, if not all, products undergo the same thing. They are created from manufacturing plants from a collection of raw materials, and are then shipped to whoever ordered or bought them. They will then be used for whatever purposes they may serve and after that, there will simply come a time when they will have to be disposed. Some of the most common phases involved in a life-cycle analysis include but may not be limited to the process of raw material extraction, manufacture and production, delivery and distribution, maintenance and repair, and disposal and recycling. Basically, the main objective of LCA tools is to enable manufacturers and even those who are going to make use of the manufactured product being analyzed have an idea as to how the product that they are using impacts the environment—either positively or negatively.
This paper will focus on the effectiveness of the Sima Pro 7.1 Software as a Life Cycle Analysis tool. There are of course a lot of other LCA tools out there but in this case, we will focus on the effectiveness and efficiency of using this one in a typical LCA process. In the Major Project Report paper authored by Broca, she used the Sima Pro 7.1 Software to analyze which among a ceramic plate and biodegradable plate manufactured using cornstarch can have more life cycle analysis ratings or basically the one that would be more practical and have less negative impact on the environment. What is good about the Sima Pro 7.1 Software as an LCA tool is that it enables the users or in this case, the companies and organizations who want to make a database of products that have the highest life cycle analysis ratings (i.e. the ones that are the most friendly to the environment), compare one product to another without having to do things manually. Since it can be run on almost any decent computer, the people who will make the analysis would just have to fill in the necessary information, feed it to the software, and then let the software do its job. The process is practically the same for almost every type of product or in Broca’s research paper’s case; the process was the same for the LCA of the ceramic plates and the ones that were made from biodegradable materials.
If there is something that can be considered as a negative aspect of the Sima Pro 7.1 Software as a life cycle analysis tool, that would be the fact that there has been no specific study that focused on its validity and reliability as an LCA tool. Sure, it was used in research papers as the primary research and data analytic instrument but little evidence exists as to its validity and reliability when used as a primary research and data analytic instrument. In the clinical setting, for example, questionnaires are frequently used to determine patient outcomes. Those questionnaires have to undergo certain validity and reliability tests before their use can be recommended to other practitioners. The same is true for the Sima Pro 7.1 Software and other LCA tools. Before they can be considered as the gold standard LCA tool, their validity and reliability have to be tested first. Other than the fact that this tool does not have an established reputation as a valid and reliable one, no major anomalies or errors exist as far as the author’s research paper is concerned because based on their conclusion, they were able to assess and compute for all the required information needed for them to generate a concrete answer to their research question—which consequently means that the Sima Pro 7.1 Software was able to fulfill its job as an LCA tool.
Given the chance to contribute ideas to the development of the tool, I would suggest adding a collection of possible graphical presentation and even animation features on the succeeding versions of the Sima Pro 7.1 Software. Perhaps in the version 7.2 of the software, they can introduce a feature that would allow the analysts to graph, tabulate, and draw a schematic diagram of the LCA and its results and then export such materials to word processing and spreadsheet software solutions so that it would be much easier to use in research and organizational purposes.