Reference Model for the Life Cycle Inventory of Technical Products

The key phrase “Product responsibility” comes more and more often to the fore in the legislation of the European Union. In the near future manufacturers of energy-using products will have to take responsibility for the environmental impacts during the entire life cycle of their products, i.e. from material production and the manufacturing through the use until the disposal. For the analysis of this environmental impacts a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), based on ISO 14040ff derivatives, is used. It is scientifically acknowledged and ecologically established. LCA contains all energy and material consumptions as well as the emissions of each process in the product’s life cycle. By technical products, a data collection develops to a very complex and time-consuming task within the life cycle assessment. This is the so called is inventory analysis of the life cycle assessment. This article presents a reference model, which will be used for the modeling of the life cycle processes and which will enable an automatic calculation of the product-orientated energy and material consumption.