Land use and biodiversity

Life cycle assessment, which can be used to evaluate “classic” impact categories, incorporates a vast majority of environmental impacts of a life cycle.

More difficulty to gather and evaluate – nevertheless scope of public discussions – seem impacts on features of the landscape like biodiversity. Different ecosystem-functions like the accumulation of ground water or the filter-capacity of soil are spotlighted as well.

Therefore, the department of life cycle engineering developed a method in 2002. Currently it’s being improved and enlarged in cooperation with international partners from industry and research.

Following ecosystem-functions are already taken into account by using this developed method within life cycle assessments:

• Erosion-resistance: The ability of soil to prevent erosion beyond natural erosion

• Mechanical filter-capacity: The ability of soil to filter a suspension by attaching pollutant to particles from the ground mechanically

• Physiochemical filter-capacity: The ability of soil to absorb dissolved substances from soil liquid to prevent the penetration into ground water

• Ground water reshaping-capacity: The ability of soil to contribute to the reshaping of ground water

• Biotic product-potential: The ability of soil to produce biomass.

Further important ecosystem-functions – which are scope of integration into the LCA method in current research projects – are storage of carbon in soil and biomass as well as conservation of biodiversity.
At the moment, the department of life cycle engineering developed and is developing methods in these areas in cooperation with several partners. By taking these efforts to harmonize different approaches, the department contributes to the international research of life cycle assessment.