A capital good is a Product with a lifetime in active use exceeding one year. Capital goods represent durable assets that contribute to production processes or service delivery over extended periods, distinguishing them from consumable inputs that are used up within shorter timeframes.
In Life Cycle Assessment, capital goods present unique modelling challenges due to their extended service lives and the need to allocate their environmental burdens across multiple production cycles or functional units. The defining threshold of one year in active use provides a practical boundary for distinguishing between capital goods and consumable products, though the actual service life of capital goods can range from several years to decades depending on the asset type and maintenance practices.
Within LCA databases such as ecoinvent, capital goods are typically modelled as services rather than physical products. This service-based approach reflects how capital goods provide productive capacity over time. The modelling relies on properties such as "capacity" or "lifetime capacity" to appropriately distribute the environmental impacts of manufacturing, maintaining, and eventually disposing of the capital good across the total output it enables during its operational lifetime.
Common examples of capital goods in LCA studies include industrial machinery, production facilities, transport vehicles, and buildings. The environmental burdens associated with these assets including raw material extraction, manufacturing, installation, maintenance, and end-of-life treatment must be carefully allocated to avoid either over-counting or under-counting their contribution to the product systems they support.
The terms capital good, Infrastructure, and investment are used synonymously in LCA practice, all referring to this category of long-lived productive assets that require appropriate temporal allocation of their life cycle impacts.
