Abiotic depletion potential

Marco Jabara and Alessandro Manzardo

Chapter 1 in Elgar Encyclopedia of Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment, 2026, pp 1-4 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: One of the most debated issues today is the conservation of natural resources and their availability for future generations. Natural resources can be divided into biotic and abiotic, and one of the world's major problems is their depletion. Abiotic resources are defined as those non-renewable fossil and mineral resources that have been generated by past biological and/or chemical/physical processes and are accessible only by extraction from the Earth's crust. For non-renewable resources, one of the most widely used tools to assess the potential environmental impact associated with their depletion is life cycle assessment (LCA). Regarding abiotic resources, numerous characterisation methods have been proposed with the development of different characterisation factors. The main method is the one proposed by Guinée and Heijungs (1995), where the characterisation factor for assessing the depletion of the i-th resource is called Abiotic Depletion Potential (ADP).

Keywords: Life Cycle Impact Assessment; Abiotic Resources; Depletion; Characterisation model; Characterisation factor; Area of Protection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035309887
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