Overview
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Read the articleAUTHORS
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François SCHNEIDER
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Jacques CHEVALIER
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Alain NAVARRO: Laboratoire d'Analyse Environnementale des Procédés et des Systèmes Industriels (LAEPSI), Institut National des Sciences Appliquées (INSA), Lyon, France
INTRODUCTION
Affecter has many synonyms: imputer, attribuer, distribuer, allouer. Generally speaking, it means assigning one's share. Who is responsible for polluting this river? What causes the greenhouse effect? What is the environmental impact of incinerating PVC bottles? All these questions represent problems of assignment. Given the complexity of the natural world and human societies, attributing environmental problems to those truly responsible is the fundamental challenge of environmental analysis, and the prerequisite for any preventive measures. What's more, allocation problems are very general in scope, since they are also encountered in economic and social analyses of systems.
We present here in detail the
Resolving allocation problems is one aspect of the goal definition stage, because in order to allocate, you first need to define the system. However, it is also part of the inventory stage. We define assignment problems as problems of assigning loads to functions. In this article, loads are defined as all flows that have an environmental impact, e.g. energy or transport requirements, consumption of natural resources, emissions of pollutants. The links between loads and impacts are established in other parts of the inventory
The function assignment considered here often involves distributing the environmental load of a system among all the functions performed by that system. However, in some cases, the assignment involves modifying the system at some point.
There is no generally accepted allocation method. As the choices made are...
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