Fires have been a part of our society both in term of controlled fires, or combustion, for heating purposes and uncontrolled accidental fires. Accidental fires cause a substantial amount of damage both economically and in terms of human lives. However, we need to better understand the relationship between these phenomena, and develop scientifically sound tools for identification of the hazard, the assessment of risk, and the implementation of fire prevention and protection measures. Such work is just beginning within ISO/TC92/SC3 under its mandate to consider not just the local effect of fire effluent on people but also its effect on the environment. A very limited number of papers have focussed on the environmental issues of fires consequently the environmental impact of fires has only recently come under scrutiny. It is, therefore, important to find a method which includes all the impacts of fires. Recently a novel LCA model, the so-called Fire-LCA model, was developed where the environmental effect of fires was incorporated into the overall treatment of the environmental impact of the product under study. The Fire-LCA model is essentially equivalent to a traditional LCA approach with the inclusion of emissions from fires as the most important modification. This model will therefore include modules to describe the fire behavior for the different types of fires. This paper presents an application of the Fire-LCA model to a refinery which is a system with a high level of fire safety. (c) 2008 The Institution of Chemical Engineers. Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.