Analysis and Comparison of Life Cycle Assessment and Carbon Footprint Software
Environmental management is receiving increased attention by researchers, policy makers and companies as today’s world is facing major environmental problems such as global warming and waste. As a consequence, companies are progressively improving their e
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Analysis and Comparison of Life Cycle Assessment and Carbon Footprint Software Marta Ormazabal, Carmen Jaca and Rogério Puga-Leal
Abstract Environmental management is receiving increased attention by researchers, policy makers and companies as today’s world is facing major environmental problems such as global warming and waste. As a consequence, companies are progressively improving their environmental practices and behaviors with the aim of reaching more advanced stages in their environmental management. Specifically, those companies most committed to environmental issues have started to introduce the concept of life-cycle and footprint thinking in their organizations. Nevertheless, there are currently many different software tools and companies may not know which one is most suitable. Consequently, the main objective of this research is to study the different software applications to help companies choose the most suitable one in each case. To achieve this objective, the paper provides an in depth review of the literature on life-cycle and footprint thinking. As a result, more than 20 software tools have been analysed and compared. It is important to highlight that the appropriateness of one software program relative to another may very much depend on the user’s scope or objective, as the database of each program could be different. Keywords LCA · Carbon footprint · Software tool · Environment
M. Ormazabal · C. Jaca (B) Department of Industrial Management, School of Industrial Engineers, University of Navarra, P º Manuel Lardizabal 13, 20018 San Sebastian, Spain e-mail: [email protected] R. Puga-Leal UNIDEMI, Departamento de Engenharia Mecânica e Industrial, Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia, FCT, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, 2829-516 Caparica, Portugal
J. Xu et al. (eds.), Proceedings of the Eighth International Conference on Management Science and Engineering Management, Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing 281, DOI: 10.1007/978-3-642-55122-2_131, © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014
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131.1 Introduction As Cramer [9] stated, environmental management “involves the study of all technical and organizational activities aimed at reducing the environmental impact caused by a company’s business operations”. Environmental management is an important issue in today’s organizations [19]; it has been only a few decades since companies realized the importance of environmental management within their organizations [7]. Because of society’s growth in awareness about the environment following a number of disasters, environmental regulations that have pushed companies to improve their environmental management have been enacted [3, 7, 8, 26]. Another reason for socially responsible business practices has been concern about the environmental effects that their activities have, in part because of the deterioration caused by past activities [1, 7]. Consequently, there is also an increasing demand for products and services that minimize environmental impact [22]. This environmental p
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