Development of normalization factors for Canada and the United States and comparison with European factors

Abstract

In Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), normalization calculates the magnitude of an impact (midpoint or endpoint) relative to the total effect of a given reference. The goal of this work is to calculate normalization factors for Canada and the US and to compare them with existing European normalization factors. The differences between geographical areas were highlighted by identifying and comparing the main contributors to a given impact category in Canada, the US and Europe. This comparison verified that the main contributors in Europe and in the US are also present in the Canadian inventory. It also showed that normalized profiles are highly dependent on the selected reference due to differences in the industrial and economic activities. To meet practitioners' needs, Canadian normalization factors have been calculated using the characterization factors from LUCAS (Canadian), IMPACT 2002+ (European), and TRACI (US) respectively. The main sources of uncertainty related to Canadian NFs are data gaps (pesticides, metals) and aggregated data (metals, VOC), but the uncertainty related to CFs generally remains unknown. A final discussion is proposed based on the comparison of resource extraction and resource consumption and raises the question of the legitimacy of defining a country by its geographical borders.