Life Cycle Assessment:
Whats our true impact on the Planet?
What is the true cost of a human life? In this episode of Material Minds, we are joined by Professor Matthias Finkbeiner, a world-renowned expert in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) from TU Berlin and INM Fellow.
While LCA typically tracks products from “cradle to grave,” Professor Finkbeiner discusses how the field is evolving to assess services, cities, and even individuals.
We play a round of “Three Truths and a Lie,” where Matthias presents fascinating case studies: a carbon footprint analysis of a pop star’s tour, a high-altitude marble mine in a national park, and a groundbreaking project to calculate the total environmental debt of a human being.
We also examine a sample of lithium carbonate from the Atacama Desert to understand “Social LCA”, a method for measuring the impact of mining on local indigenous communities.