Review of patents on life cycle assessment

Many tools are developed and used in order to evaluate the environmental impacts in products and services. One tool that is gaining prominence is the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), which can analyze environmental aspects and impacts along the life cycle of product. However, not much is known about the patent generation through the use of LCA. In this sense, this paper aims to investigate LCA studies that generated patents through innovation in both products and processes. To reach the proposed objective, three patents basis data were used: WIPO, INPI and EPO. Eleven different patents requested involving LCA applications were found. The LCA and innovation generation need to be more explored, expanding the vision of organizations for this issue. LCA has a great potential to improve the environmental performance of products, processes and services and, at the same time, can assist in innovations generation and in technological development through patents requests.   Key words: Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), innovation, patents.