Gregory A Norris

Harvard University | Harvard · Harvard School of Public Health

Spawn-Lee et al published a comment on our recent paper, ‘Carbon intensity of corn ethanol in the United States: state of the science.’ Their commentary is critical of our methodology and conclusions regarding greenhouse gas (GHG) life cycle analyses (LCAs) for corn starch ethanol and gives particular attention to the estimation of emissions from l...

Purpose The Sustainability and Health Initiative for NetPositive Enterprise (SHINE) project is dedicated to improving the scientific basis for transformative environmental, social, and economic positive changes called handprints. Organizations and individuals can create handprints relative to their business-as-usual (BAU) through voluntary reductio...

The carbon intensity (CI) of corn ethanol, the primary renewable fuel used in transportation, has been actively researched and quantified over the last three decades. Reliable estimates of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions for corn ethanol are important since these values help determine significant policy and market decisions on state, national, and i...

Net Positive may well be the buzzword of this decade. Beyond the noise, it has the potential to be a transformational movement, helping businesses to redefine their role in society, their social purpose. As an idea, it simplicity and candor make it both extremely attractive and powerful. It poses a great question and sets a challenge: Can we give m...

This article introduces a process that can be used by companies to obtain an increasingly precise picture of their supply chain social footprint (negative impacts) and identify potential social handprints (i.e., changes to business as usual that create positive impacts) using social organizational life cycle assessment (SO-LCA). The process was dev...

Purpose Social sustainability may be assessed using a variety of methods and indicators, such as the social footprint, social impact assessment, or wellbeing indices. The UNEP guidelines on social life cycle assessment (sLCA) present key elements to consider for product-level, life cycle-based social sustainability assessment. This includes guidanc...

Our study illustrates how consumer social risk footprints can assist in achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Combining the Social Hotspots Database (SHDB) and the Eora global multi-regional input-output table, we use input-output analysis to calculate a consumer social risk footprint (SF) of nations' imports. For our SFs, we select f...

In this study, we innovatively apply multiregional input-output analysis to calculate corruption footprints of nations and show the details of commodities that use the most employment affected by corruption (EAC), as they flow between countries. Every country's corruption footprint includes its domestic corruption and the corruption imported by glo...

Innovative strategies are needed to improve the sustainability of beef production and consumption systems. Increasing reliance on regional or local food systems may improve resilience, and consumer demand for such foods is high. In the Northeastern U.S., the dairy sector may provide beef at a low environmental cost relative to other systems due to...

Energy efficiency (EE) and renewable energy (RE) can benefit public health and the climate by displacing emissions from fossil-fuelled electrical generating units (EGUs). Benefits can vary substantially by EE/RE installation type and location, due to differing electricity generation or savings by location, characteristics of the electrical grid and...

Introduction Life cycle assessment (LCA) has a technical architecture that limits data interoperability, transparency, and automated integration of external data. More advanced information technologies offer promise for increasing the ease with which information can be synthesized within an LCA framework. Vision A new architecture is described t...

Data collection, or the inventory step, is often the most labor-intensive phase of any Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) study. The S-LCA Guidelines and numerous authors have recommended generic assessment in this first phase of an S-LCA. In an effort to identify the social hotspots in the supply chains of 100 product categories during just a few months'...

Purpose A life cycle assessment was conducted to determine a baseline for environmental impacts of cheddar and mozzarella cheese consumption. Product loss/waste, as well as consumer transport and storage, is included. The study scope was from cradle-to-grave with particular emphasis on unit operations under the control of typical cheese-processing...

One emerging tool to measure the social-related impacts in supply chains is Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA), a derivative of the well-established environmental LCA technique. LCA has recently started to gain popularity among large corporations and initiatives, such as The Sustainability Consortium or the Sustainable Apparel Coalition. Both hav...

The analysis of social impacts of product supply chains is receiving substantial interest from corporations and their stakeholders. Social LCA is a technique that allows for the generation, organization, assessment and communication of product life cycles' social impacts. The Social Hotspots Database provides a three layered system to assess the po...

Social life cycle assessment (SLCA) is a technique to measure social and socio-economic impacts of product life cycles. The social hotspots database (SHDB) is an overarching, global model that eases the data collection burden in SLCA studies. It enables supply chain visibility by providing the information decision-makers need to prioritise unit pro...

PurposeAuthors of different sustainability journals, including authors of articles in past issues of the International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment have acknowledged the rising interest and the pressing need for a social and socio-economic life cycle assessment methodology and identified challenges in its development and implementation. Social...

Summary Practitioners of life cycle assessment (LCA) have recently turned their attention to social issues in the supply chain. The United Nations life cycle initiative's social LCA task force has completed its guidelines for social life cycle assessment of products, and awareness of managing upstream corporate social responsibility (CSR) issues ha...

Behind the life cycle of a product, from the cradle to the grave, there is a story to tell. Not only about its potential impact on the environment, but as well in terms of social and socio-economic impacts - or potential impacts - of its production and consumption on the workers, the local communities, the consumers, the society and all value chai...

Life-cycle assessments (LCAs) can be used to support the selection of environmentally preferable building materials. But the dominance of the usage phase in the life cycle of building materials represents a special challenge for two reasons. First, many aspects of a building material's usage phase can be context specific. Second, the LCA outcome ma...

SummaryE-commerce is often cited as offering the potential to reduce wholesale and retail burdens within product life cycles; however its potential impacts upon transport may be positive or negative. But the relative environmental importance of wholesale and retail trade and their intervening transportation links within product life cycles has not...

The tool for the reduction and assessment of chemical and other environmental impacts (TRACI) is a set of life-cycle impact assessment (LCIA) characterization methods that has been developed by a series of U.S. Environmental Protection Agency research projects. TRACI facilitates the characterization of stressors that may have potential effects, inc...

Many companies have stepped forward to announce long-term public greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction goals. These companies have generally been lauded by their customers and shareholders for taking proactive steps to address climate change. However, there have been few efforts to evaluate the extent to which these public corporate GHG goals represent ac...

Normalization is an optional step within Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) that may be used to assist in the interpretation of life cycle inventory data as well as life cycle impact assessment results. Normalization transforms the magnitude of LCI and LCIA results into relative contribution by substance and life cycle impact category. Normalizati...

-DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1065/lca2006.04.017 Background, Aims and Scope Social impacts in supply chains and product life cycles are of increasing interest to policy makers and stakeholders. Work is underway to develop social impact indicators for LCA, and to identify the social inventory data that will drive impact assessment for this category....

Manufacturers in the electronics industry are faced with product shelf life counted in months (Goeing, 2004). Traditionally, this has made it very difficult to make a life cycle assessment (LCA) of a product, since the product would be obsolete by the time the LCA was completed. New concepts in LCA allow specialists in things other than LCA to rapi...

Manufacturers in many of today's industries are faced with product shelf life counted in months. Traditionally, this has made it very difficult to make a life cycle assessment (LCA) of a product, since the product would be obsolete by the time the LCA was completed. A new concept in LCA that allows specialists in things other than LCA to rapidly cr...

Assessing Impacts: Indicators and Metrics Assessing Values: Costs and Benefits Auditing Sustainability Performance Reporting Sustainability Performance: Latest Trends in Corporate Reporting, New Tools, and Practices Security and Sustainability Building Corporate Social Responsibility References

Goal, Scope and Background In the first part of this paper, we developed a methodology to incorporate exposure and risk concepts into life cycle impact assessment (LCIA). We argued that both risk assessment and LCIA are needed to consider the impacts of increasing insulation for single-family homes in the US from current practice to the levels reco...

To date the most common measures of environmental performance used to compare industries, and by extension firms or facilities, have been quantity of pollution emitted or hazardous waste generated. Discharge information, however, does not necessarily capture potential health effects. We propose an alternative environmental performance measure that...

A three-day workshop was held in October 2001 to discuss life cycle inventory data for electricity production. Electricity was selected as the topic for discussion since it features very prominently in the LCA results for most product life cycles, yet there is no consistency in how these data are calculated and presented. Approximately 40 people at...

Goal, Scope and Background Incorporation of exposure and risk concepts into life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) is often impaired by the number of sources and the complexity of site-specific impact assessment, especially when input-output (I-O) analysis is used to evaluate upstream processes. This makes it difficult to interpret LCIA outputs, espec...

This is the main report of the project “Prioritisation within the integrated product policy” commissioned by the Danish Environmental Protection Agency in the years 2003-4. The main objectives of the project was to: • Establish a detailed and well-documented method for prioritising product areas and product groups where Danish measures will provi...

Sustainable development requires methods and tools to measure and compare the environmental impacts of human activities for the provision of goods and services (both of which are summarized under the term "products"). Environmental impacts include those from emissions into the environment and through the consumption of resources, as well as other i...

Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is a method for evaluating the environmental impacts of products holistically, including direct and supply chain impacts. The current LCA methodologies and the standards by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) impose practical difficulties for drawing system boundaries; decisions on inclusion or exclu...

Transferring life cycle thinking into business practice requires applicable assessment tools and management approaches. Different methods from screening eco design tools to full Life Cycle Assessment have been developed for fostering environmentally compatible electronics design. Life Cycle Assessment still deals with many obstacles, limiting its i...

Most analyses of health risks incident to the adoption of a product, process or facility treat only the effects of human exposure to pollutants. A growing body of research in the social sciences suggests strong linkages between health status and the economic status of populations. This paper considers the possibility that the effects of development...

Integrated product policy (IPP) and life cycle assessment (LCA), one of the analytic tools used in IPP, focus traditionally on environmental impacts. However, in an attempt to consider other sustainability criteria and to avoid a shift from environmental health impacts to occupational health impacts one may want to include occupational health in IP...

The tool for the reduction and assessment of chemical and other environmental impacts (TRACI) is described along with its history, the research and methodologies it incorporates, and the insights it provides within individual impact categories. TRACI; a stand-alone computer program developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, facilitates...

Increasing residential insulation can decrease energy consumption and provide public health benefits, given changes in emissions from fuel combustion, but also has cost implications and ancillary risks and benefits. Risk assessment or life cycle assessment can be used to calculate the net impacts and determine whether more stringent energy codes or...

Refinements of methods for life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) are directed at removing unjustified simplifications and quantifying and reducing uncertainties in results. The amount of uncertainty reduction that is actually achieved through LCIA method refinement depends on the structure of the life cycle inventory model. We investigate the general...

this article we provide an overview of the commonly used MADA methods and discuss LCIA in relation to them. The article also presents how different frames and tools developed by the MADA community can be applied in conducting LCIAs. Although the exact framing of LCIA using decision analysis still merits debate, we show that the similarities between...

The conclusions about the development of the content of the LC Initiative are the following: A specific niche for the Life Cycle Initiative has developed, compared with the role of SETAC, the International Society of Industrial Ecology (ISIE) and ISO. The aims of the initiative have step by step been extended, by bringing the initiative at a world...

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Life-cycle impact assessments (LCIAs) are complex because they almost always involve uncertain consequences relative to multiple criteria. Several authors have noticed that this is precisely the sort of problem addressed by methods of decision analysis. Despite several experiences of using multipleattribute decision analysis (MADA) methods in LCIA,...

Modelling data uncertainty is not common practice in life cycle inventories (LCI), although different techniques are available for estimating and expressing uncertainties, and for propagating the uncertainties to the final model results. To clarify and stimulate the use of data uncertainty assessments in common LCI practice, the SETAC working group...

The private sector decision making situations which LCA addresses mustalso eventually take theeconomic 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 t...

Two purposes for normalization in LCA are presented: resolving non-commensurate units, and assessing significance. Two families of approach for normalization in LCA are described: internal and external. The need for congruence between the normalization and valuation is illustrated by showing the nonsensical conclusions which can result from an appr...

In nearly all private industry applications of LCA, the 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 th...

Metrics (potentials, potency factors, equivalency factors or characterization factors) are available to support the environmental comparison of alternatives in application domains like process design and product life-cycle assessment (LCA). These metrics typically provide relative insights into the implicit concern associated with chemicals, emissi...

Multiattribute decision analysis (MADA) methods consider non-financial attributes (qualitative and quantitative) in addition to common financial worth measures when evaluating project alternatives. The report reviews 14 classes of methods for performing MADA. It summarizes their usefulness for screening, ranking, and choosing among projects; their...

One of the ways in which risk assessment can inform life-cycle analysis (LCA) is by providing a mechanism to translate midpoint categories into common endpoints. Although this analytical step is complex and often highly uncertain, it can allow for prioritization among disparate midpoints and subsequent analytical refinements focused on the endpoint...

In addition to the research and case studies that are underway in the private sector, there is ongoing research and development in the field of LCA in the US. This paper will briefly mention several of these efforts and give references and websites for further investigation. LCAccess, a webpage developed by the U.S. EPA's National Risk Management R...

This paper provides the rationale for, and a summary of, work in progress to develop and apply household-level modeling capabilities in both top-down and bottom-up modeling which supports evaluation of sustainable consumption policies. The top-down modeling framework being addressed is a dynamic, economic input/output life cycle assessment framewor...

This paper proposes a need-based definition of sustainable consumption, which relates to the ends of sustainable development, rather than intermediate means. It then examines the properties of present-day life cycle assessment from the vantage point of this definition. It closes with recommended changes to the present day LCA framework which will p...

Children are more than the future leaders and inheritors of the earth. They are also, in the present, a major source of ideas, creativity, hope, energy, and inspiration for all the world's people. Progress on sustainable development will quicken as children come to understand major sustainable development issues if they are then empowered to respon...

Companies benefit greatly from streamlined models and tools that can be used to mine for data and prioritize issues regarding the potential impacts of their operations and products. Guided by the well-established fields of Environmental Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Corporate Social Responsibility, Social LCA is a developing technique that allows...

Introduction What is a life cycle assessment worth? How much should one spend on an LCA, and what are the expected returns from undertaking one? The value of an LCA ought to be readily estimable by anyone proposing to fund an LCA, or by anyone seeking funds for undertaking an LCA. Assessing the value of a potential LCA as a function of its uncertai...

This report has been prepared by the SETAC Europe Scientific Task Group on Global And RegionaL Impact Categories (SETAC-Europe/STG-GARLIC) that is installed by the 2nd SETAC Europe working group on life cycle impact assessment (WIA-2). This document is background to a chapter written by the same authors under the title "Climate change, stratospheri...

This report has been prepared by the SETAC Europe Scientific Task Group on Global And RegionaL Impact Categories (SETAC-Europe/STG-GARLIC) that is installed by the 2nd SETAC Europe working group on life cycle impact assessment (WIA-2). This document is background to a chapter written by the same authors under the title "Climate change, stratospheri...

Transferring life cycle thinking into business practice requires applicable assessment tools and management approaches. Different methods from screening eco design tools to full Life Cycle Assessment have been developed for fostering environmentally compatible electronics design. Life Cycle Assessment still deals with many obstacles, limiting its i...