This study was performed jointly by ENEA (Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Environment), Bologna and Florence Universities and the firm BEGHELLI. The system function to be studied is the lighting of a room where a blackout has occurred. The functional unit is an emergency lamp manufactured by BEGHELLI, provided by a fluorescent tube and an accumulator battery with lead elements. The lamp life lasts 10 years. LCA is obtained by using the SimPro 3.1 code and two methods: Eco indicator 95 with the normalisation weight ascribed to 10 years and a new method obtained by enclosing into the Eco - indicator 95 method some new damage categories such as some raw material depletion, solid and energy. The results show that the accumulator battery, the structure of the lamp and the electronic board are the components with greater environmental damage and the electrical energy for use produces 31% of total damage calculated by the Eco - indicator method. The most important categories of damage produced by accumulator battery are acidification due to material production and heavy metals due to disposal treatment of lead, and the ones produced by electronic card are acidification and winter smog due to copper production. To reduce the damage of emergency lamp some new solutions have been proposed. Finally the characteristics to obtain emergency lamp Ecolabel have been proposed.

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