In the two previous papers of the series on Life Cycle Assessments, we guided you through the fundamentals of an LCA, introduced you to two well-known methodologies to perform such assessments, and presented you with a very relevant organization, GFLI, that could figure as an example for other industries to follow.
In this paper, we will dive into a more technical aspect of LCAs, namely allocation methods. This phenomenon refers to the procedure used to allocate the environmental impacts in systems where multiple products or functions share common processes, i.e. when you have multiple output processes. We will discuss why allocation is so important in certain cases and what types of allocation exist to allocate certain burdens associated with a process among various outputs.