Extracting the characteristics of life cycle assessments via data mining

Life cycle assessments (LCAs) follow the ISO 14040 standard and consist of the following steps: 1) goal and scope definition, 2) life cycle inventory analysis, 3) life cycle impact assessment, and 4) interpretation. Prior literature reviews of wastewater treatment and water reuse LCAs have evaluated the methods implemented within these assessments. In lieu of manually tabulating the characteristic features of LCAs, Data Mining LCAs provides a method to facilitate the extraction of key characteristics. The process consists of the following: • Each journal article is converted to a text file and read in Python. • Search terms are defined for each characteristic of the LCA to be extracted. • By employing Python's regular expressions operations and the natural language toolkit (NLTK), the functional unit, life cycle impact characterization method, and the location of each case study are identified.