When the LCA has been completed, the materials must be assembled into a comprehensive report documenting the study in a clear and organized manner. This will help communicate the results of the assessment fairly, completely, and accurately to others interested in the results. The report presents the results, data, methods, assumptions and limitations in sufficient detail to allow the reader to comprehend the complexities and trade‐offs inherent in the LCA study.
If the results will be communicated to parties who were not involved in the LCA study (e.g. stakeholders), the report will serve as a reference document, and it can help prevent any misrepresentation of the results.
Conclusion
Adding LCA to the decision‐making process provides a level of understanding of human health and environmental impacts that traditionally has not been available to those responsible for selecting a product or process. This valuable information provides a way to account for the full impacts of decisions, especially those made off‐site, that are directly influenced by the selection of a product or process. As emphasized earlier, LCA is a tool to better inform decision‐makers and other decision criteria such as cost and performance must be weighed to reach a well‐balanced decision.
As we have seen, LCA and LCI can be valuable tools in environmental analysis. To make sense of the many large data sets collected in any such study is clearly a task too complex to be undertaken without the assistance of computers. Section 6.3 describes some of the software tools that have been developed for this purpose.
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