Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a method for quantifying the environmental impacts of a product over the life cycle. In the last years, there have been a growing application of LCA in developments of environmental product declaration (EPD), which is utilised by professional procurement of materials for buildings. For legislative issues, LCA have also been used to assess application of creosote to treat wood products for considering if there are better alternatives. In the last decade, there has also been an attempt from European Commission (EC) to harmonise LCA in application as simplified consumer information for products. The use of LCA for construction products have undergone extensive standardisation in CEN to ensure reliable results, but toxicity indicators are not yet implemented due to high uncertainties. For leaching of wood preservatives, the uncertainty is two fold. The actual leaching over several years can be hard to predict, but the characterisation factors (CF) can potentially have even higher uncertainty. To deal with this uncertainty, the USEtox model have been developed and is recommended by the EC. There are few LCA studies that include USEtox on wood preservatives and the objective of the study was to assess which effect the uncertainty of CF can have. For freshwater ecotoxicity of copper, the study finds that the site-dependent uncertainty of CF are very important and can dominate the LCA of treated wood.

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