W10 AM Life Cycle Approaches to Water Resources
Wednesday, 16 November 2005: 8:00 AM - 11:40 AM in 341-342

(BRA-1117-829655) Stakeholder involvement in EPIC-ICT - an LCA-based EU project affecting the electronics sector.

Braune, A¹, Warburg, N¹, Herrmann, C², Kreissig, J², Stutz, M³, ¹ University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany² PE Europe GmbH, Stuttgart, Germany³ Motorola Advanced Technology Center - Europe, Taunusstein, Germany

ABSTRACT- LCA is a method to enhance decision-making in industry and for policy-making by taking environmental issues of the complete life cycle of products into account. Different actors, who all have direct or indirect influence on a product's environmental performance, have different views on the whole system and different spheres of influence. They all have diverse intentions for taking part in Life Cycle Assessment studies. In order to increase the credibility and public acceptance of results from LCA studies, adequate integration of stakeholders is of crucial importance. Both, studies mainly carried out in close cooperation with industry as well as mainly publicly funded studies need to meet the stakeholders' demands and provide impartial results. Recently various environmentally driven legislations in the electronics and other sectors have not sufficiently included the stakeholders' needs. Based on this procedure strong disapproval by affected parties can be seen. Therefore, new LCA based legislative measures to be implemented will increasingly take stakeholders needs into account. This presentation will describe how the EU initiated EPIC-ICT project (Development of Environmental Performance Indicators for ICT products) copes with adequate participation of affected internal and external stakeholders. On the one hand, experiences with methods to address external actors will be provided (e.g. workshops, newsletter etc.). The success of these methods will be presented by showing the positive feedback of the involved stakeholders, representing various groups (industrial, governmental various NGOs and organizations like CENELEC, CEN,). On the other hand, the presentation will dwell on practical aspects of internal participation of the partners (e.g. Dell, Motorola, Philips), like information exchange and validation of information. Proven solutions like scenario analysis, relevance and weak point analysis will be presented.

Key words: Stakeholder participation, EPIC-ICT, electronics sector, computer