Investment refers to Infrastructure, which encompasses products with a lifetime in active use exceeding one year. In Life Cycle Assessment, infrastructure represents long-lived capital goods that provide services over extended periods rather than being consumed in a single production cycle.
Infrastructure is distinguished from other product types by its durability and the way it contributes to production processes. Rather than being directly transformed or consumed, infrastructure provides ongoing capacity or functionality throughout its operational lifetime. Examples include buildings, machinery, equipment, vehicles, and other capital assets that support production activities over multiple years.
In LCA databases such as ecoinvent, infrastructure is typically modelled as a service rather than as a physical good. This modelling approach reflects the fact that what matters for impact assessment is not the infrastructure itself, but rather the service it provides to the production process. Infrastructure datasets are commonly identified by properties such as "capacity" or "lifetime capacity", which express the total functional output the infrastructure can deliver over its entire operational life.
When conducting Life Cycle Inventory analysis, the environmental burdens associated with infrastructure must be allocated across all the products or services that benefit from its use during its lifetime. This allocation is typically based on the infrastructure's capacity utilisation, ensuring that each product or service bears an appropriate share of the infrastructure's life cycle impacts.
The terms capital good and investment are used synonymously with infrastructure in LCA terminology, all referring to these long-lived productive assets that exceed one year of active use.
