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The private sector decision making situations which
LCA addresses must also eventually take the economic consequences of alternative products or product designs into account.
However, neither the internal nor external economic aspects of
the decisions are within the scope of developed LCA methodology, nor are they properly addressed by existing LCA tools. This
traditional separation of life cycle environmental assessment from
economic analysis has limited the influence and relevance of
LCA for decision-making, and left uncharacterized the important relationships and trade-offs between the economic and life
cycle environmental performance of alternative product design
decision scenarios. Still standard methods of LCA can and have
been tightly, logically, and practically integrated with standard
methods for cost accounting, life cycle cost analysis, and scenario-based economic risk modeling. The result is an ability to
take both economic and environmental performance - and their
tradeoff relationships - into account in product/process design
decision making.