Combined approach of Risk Assessment and Life Cycle Assessment for the environmental evaluations: an overview

The environmental evaluations of processes and technology, especially the emerging ones, need a very detailed analysis and often the correct way to perform it is to use different tools to obtain the best results. The aim of this paper is to describe the roles and information from the methodologies Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Risk Assessment (RA) to find possible alternative ways for combining them, using studies from literature. There are many advantages with an integrated approach but there are also difficulties and limits due to their different characteristics, conceptual model and purposes.