Role: A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) facilitates the systematic quantitative assessment of products, both goods and services, in terms of environmental, human health, and resource consumption considerations. The full life cycle of a product is taken into account– this includes the supply of raw materials, processing, transport, retail, use, as well as end-of-life waste management. Life Cycle Impact assessment (LCIA) is the phase in which the set of results of the Inventory Analysis, mainly the inventory table with emissions and extractions, is further processed and interpreted in terms of environmental impacts and societal preferences. To this end, a list of impact categories (environmental problems) is defined, and models for relating environmental interventions to suitable category indicators for these impact categories are selected. The actual modeling results are calculated in the characterization step, and an optional normalization serves to indicate the share of the modeled results in a worldwide or regional total. CML-IA is a database that contains characterization and normalization factors for life cycle impact assessment (LCIA). It contains the characterization factors for all baseline characterization methods mentioned in the Handbook on LCA, such as GWP100, POCP, HTPinf and AP. Guinée et al. (2002), J.B. Handbook on life cycle assessment. Operational guide to the ISO standards. I: LCA in perspective. IIa: Guide. IIb: Operational annex. III: Scientific background. Kluwer Academic Publishers, ISBN 1-4020-0228-9, Dordrecht. http://www.cml.leiden.edu/research/industrialecology/researchprojects/finished/new-dutch-lca-guide.html The CML2002 set of impact assessment factors are defined on the midpoint level (e.g. abiotic resource depletion of elements, abiotic resource depletion of fossil fuels, global warming, ecotoxicity, acidification etc.)