Infrastructure is a Product with a lifetime in active use exceeding one year. This temporal threshold distinguishes infrastructure from consumable products and materials that are used up or replaced within shorter timeframes. The defining characteristic of infrastructure is its extended service life, which fundamentally affects how its environmental burdens are allocated across the activities it supports.
Whilst ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 do not provide a specific definition for infrastructure, they address the treatment of capital goods within the system boundary definition and allocation procedures. The standards recognise that long-lived assets require special consideration in Life Cycle Assessment, as their environmental impacts must be appropriately distributed across their functional lifetime.
In LCA databases, particularly the ecoinvent database, infrastructure is typically modelled as a Service rather than as a tangible good. This modelling approach reflects the fact that what matters for LCA purposes is not the physical infrastructure itself, but rather the service capacity it provides over time. Infrastructure datasets are commonly identified by properties such as "capacity" or "lifetime capacity", which quantify the total functional output the infrastructure can deliver throughout its operational lifetime. For example, a factory building might be characterised by its production capacity over its expected 30-year lifetime, or a road by its traffic capacity over its design life.
This capacity-based approach allows LCA practitioners to allocate the burdens from infrastructure construction, maintenance, and eventual decommissioning across all the production activities that benefit from the infrastructure throughout its lifetime. By treating infrastructure as a service provision rather than a discrete product, the methodology ensures that each unit of production receives an appropriate share of the infrastructure's life cycle impacts.
The terms capital good and investment are used synonymously with infrastructure in economic contexts, though in LCA practice, "infrastructure" is the preferred term as it more clearly conveys the physical, long-lived nature of these assets.
