2.3. Uncertainty and sensitivity analysis
As many of the input-data sources were uncertain, a Monte Carlo uncertainty/sensitivity analysis was applied. As a first step, the matrix LCA was subjected to a “perturbation analysis”
(Heijungs, 2010; Heijungs and Suh, 2002), which gave an estimate of the sensitivity of environmental impacts to changes in individual parameters. This was done by calculating first order partial derivatives of each of the parameters in eq (1) and scaling them to the size of the parameters. In principle this measured the relative importance of each parameter to the overall impact for each impact category.