LCAs

Governments can increase the usage of LCAs (Life Cycle Assessment) through following ways:

1. Promoting, funding and granting research activities on designing and improving LCA tools that are conducted in the universities and research institutions. This way increasing the number and the quality of the tools would be supported by the government, this way the use of LCAs will be indirectly icreased.
2. Coming up with environmental certificates that are similar in logic to quality control certificates or sustainability indexes. In other words globally accepted environmental standards for each product and supply chain can be formed. Assessing of environmental impact and environmental impact can be done gradually obligatory, and that would have a positive effect o increasing the usage.
3. After the above policy, there can be done additional regulations which have monetary impacts on the firms either like taxes or premiums according to the data and measurements gathered from the LCA tools.
4. For the assessment of environmental impacts through LCAs the government can support third party consulting companies which will act like auditors in the financial system. So this policy has to be well analyzed and designed in order to be fair and transparent.

I would like to choose the second way primarily. Creating an environmental quality standard would support the developments of LCAs at the same time broadening their usage.