A life cycle assessment result represents the complete environmental profile of a Product system, combining both the inventory of Elementary exchanges and the potential environmental Impacts associated with that system. This comprehensive result integrates two fundamental components of Life Cycle Assessment into a unified presentation.
The first component is the Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) result, which catalogues all elementary exchanges of the product system. These are the flows crossing the system boundary between human activities and the natural, social or economic environment. Elementary exchanges include unprocessed inputs from nature, emissions to air, water and soil, physical impacts, and working hours under specified conditions. According to ISO 14040, the LCI result provides the starting point for impact assessment by documenting all material and energy flows entering from or leaving to the environment without human transformation.
The second component is the Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) result, which translates the inventory of elementary exchanges into potential environmental impacts. The LCIA result expresses these impacts in amounts of one or more impact category indicators, representing the magnitude and significance of environmental effects across various impact categories such as climate change, resource depletion, human health effects and ecosystem quality.
When these two results are presented together, they constitute the life cycle assessment result, offering both the detailed inventory of environmental exchanges and the evaluated significance of those exchanges in terms of their potential impacts. This integrated presentation enables comprehensive understanding of a product system's environmental performance throughout its entire life cycle, from raw material extraction through production, use and final disposal.
The term "accumulated system result" is used synonymously, emphasising that the result represents the accumulation of all environmental exchanges and impacts across the complete product system under study.
