Development of normalisation references for use in the metals industry

Within Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), normalisation is a step to put impact indicator results in perspective with a known reference and thus support further interpretation of the LCA results. In practice, normalisation references, which are used as benchmark in this exercise, need to be calculated.

The ICMM-Normalisation project aims to determine updated global normalisation references that would allow ICMM (International Council on Mining and Metals) to perform LCA studies with use of the normalisation step. Concretely, the project first relies on the building of an inventory of global and, when possible, regional pollutant emissions and resource use, using available data for the most recent year available. The thus generated inventory is then computed to develop sets of regional and global normalisation references using both CML and EF3.1 LCIA methodologies.

QSA tasks:
• To build global emission inventories, with regionalization, when possible, for the most recent reference year available
• To develop sets of regional and global normalization references for both CML and EF3.1 LCIA methodologies