Integrating life cycle cost analysis and LCA

The private sector decision making situations which LCA addresses must also eventually take the economic consequences of alternative products or produ ct designs into account. However, neither the internal nor external economi c aspects of the decisions are within the scope of developed LCA methodolog y, nor are they properly addressed by existing LCA tools. This traditional separation of life cycle environmental assessment from economic analysis ha s limited the influence and relevance of LCA for decision-making, and left uncharacterized the important relationships and trade-offs between the econ omic and life cycle environmental performance of alternative product design decision scenarios. Still standard methods of LCA can and have been tightl y, logically, and practically integrated with standard methods for cost acc ounting, life cycle cost analysis, and scenario-based economic risk modelin g. The result is an ability to take both economic and environmental perform ance - and their tradeoff relationships - into account in product/process d esign decision making.