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External environmental costs in LCC

From a methodological aspect, LCC is well developed with respect to conventional costs. However, when it comes to costs related to environmental issues, neither the items, nor their estimation is well developed.

Some of the items of an LCC have to do with increased/decreased sales, others with goodwill. Both are difficult to estimate, but LCA or LCA-like investigations may be used for benchmarking and trend analysis.

Future costs to the product system may also be estimated, e.g. with a distance-to-target type of weighting, like in the DESC model.

LCA may be used to estimate risks, especially together with those LCA impact assessment methods that model damage. Such an item in the LCC can be dealt with as an insurance fee or in case the risk is too high, as a way to include necessary preventive actions.

In today's cost accounting it is often difficult to find environmental related costs. An LCA helps in identifying many of these costs.