Assessing Status of Life Cycle Assessment Studies in Egypt

One of the tools used worldwide nowadays for achieving sustainable development is “Life cycle assessment.” This tool is being used to assess and compare environmental impacts of products or services through their entire lifetime. Researchers and environmental experts in both academia and industry are using Life cycle assessment (LCA) as it presents a quantitated and qualitative tool that reflects the environmental impacts. In spite of this, it was noted that limited studies employed this important tool in Egyptian cases. The goal of this review paper was to identify potential usage of LCA in Egypt. This was done by evaluating the conducted studies concerning this area in Egypt and main gaps and challenges were determinined, accordingly. Improvement options and future requirements for using LCA in Egypt would then be recommended.

In order to assess the statues of the LCA studies in Egypt, the published documents by both national and international scholars related to LCA cases conducted in Egypt during the period of 2006 till 2019 were collected and reviewed. It was found that 39 documents were published concerning this area. The published documents covered seven main area of studies namely; building and construction materials, aquaculture farming, energy, industrial manufacturing, transportation, water treatment and waste handling. Top publications were in the building and construction materials field accounting for 44% of the total publications followed by energy, aquaculture farming, waste handling strategies, and industrial manufacturing of textile and packing materials (13%, 13%, 13 and 8% of the total publications, respectively). The main benefits as well as gaps of the conducted studies were discussed for each area. Current concerns, need of future studies as well as related recommendation and suggestions were also presented.

Keywords: Life cycle assessment; sustainable development; Egypt

*Corresponding author: E-mail: Dalia.abdelfattah@umu.se