3. Carrying out the inventory

The inventory itself is a material-energy balance of the product system as defined when defining the scope of the study. The analysis of the life cycle inventory (LCI) then focuses on calculation and data collection methods. According to ISO 14041 , the operational stages include :

• description of the elementary processes considered ;

• data collection (by measurement, calculation, estimation or in literature) and calculation, including: setting up a data storage format; establishing the balance for each elementary process on the basis...