Side effects of categorized environmental measures and their implications for impact analysis

The theoretical framework of the chain analysis tools, life cycle assessment and substance flow analysis is used to define five different types of environmental measures: volume measures (1), efficiency measures (2), end-of-pipe emission reduction measures (3), re-use and recycling (4) and useful application of waste products (5). Each of these types of measures can re-direct substance flow in a different process, thus causing pollutant emissions to the environment to shift to similar or other emissions upstream or downstream in the economic chain. Using this categorization, the occurrence of a number of different processes that can lead to side effects can be predicted.