Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a tool for assessing the environmental
impacts of a product or service throughout its life cycle. LCA is considered an
important modeling tool for sustainability assessment and many universities are
currently offering LCA courses. However, due to unavailability of established text
books or approaches, it is difficult for an instructor to develop and teach an LCA
course. The goal of this chapter was to share the experience from the University of
Toledo in developing and teaching of an LCA course. A systematic approach based
upon Fink’s taxonomy of learning was used in designing the course. The course was
organized in ten learning modules: introduction to LCA, LCA steps, EIOLCA, process
based LCA, computational structure of LCA, carbon footprint analysis, personal
footprints, life cycle costing, LCA peer reviewed literature, and semester long project.
Active learning methods were used throughout the semester with at least one
assignment per module. The process based LCA module was taught via slides, manual
matrix calculations, and use of the commercial GaBi LCA software. The LCA peer
reviewed literature module included written and oral presentation assignments
requiring students to evaluate the LCA aspects of the paper as well as technical writing
and technical quality of the paper. The semester long project was taught using multiple
steps and encompassed most of the course objectives identified earlier in the course
design.
Keywords: Carbon footprint, GaBi, Graduate class, Learning modules, Life cycle
assessment, Life cycle costing, Semester long project, Sustainability assessment.
