As one of the most popular areas of research in industrial ecology, industrial symbiosis has received a great deal of attention from researchers in recent years. Environmental benefits, including efficient resource recycling and waste utilization, are the primary factors that distinguish industrial symbiosis from other economic systems, and are considered the objectives of achieving the successful development of ecological industries. Thus, research has gradually shifted from the qualitative description of industrial symbiosis to its quantitative and systematic evaluation, which incorporates material flow analyses, energy analyses, and the structuring of index systems. However, there are several drawbacks to these traditional methods:1) the symbiosis is treated as "black box", which ignores the mutual effects of internal processes, and 2) these methods usually focus on the system itself, but neglect upstream, downstream, and replacement processes that account for 20% to 50% of the overall environmental impact. This increases the risk of producing emissions that are then transferred to supply chains outside of the system under examination. In order to avoid the problem of environmental impact transferred in different life cycle stages, life cycle assessment (LCA) is introduced to the field in benefits evaluation of industrial symbiosis to gain more objective and systematic results of environmental impact assessment. In light of this, this paper first reviews the process of developing life cycle assessments intended for use in the study of industrial symbiosis. These can take two different approaches:the evaluation of existing industrial symbioses in order to facilitate the identification of potential symbiotic relationships that could be developed further, and the outright planning and design of industrial symbiosis systems, in order to optimize plans and ensure that they are environmentally friendly prior to construction. In these different case studies, life cycle assessments have proven vital to the analysis of the benefits of symbiosis. In this paper, previous reviews are used to analyze and compare the three established methods of life cycle analysis:process-LCA, IO-LCA, and hybrid-LCA. These strategies primarily differ with respect to methods, range, and the data resources available for inventory collection. Nevertheless, when introduced to the study of industrial symbiosis, certain key issues with applying traditional life cycle assessments to a single product system remain unresolved:1) set of functional unit:there are two choices of function unit, one is economic quantity (currency) produced by the symbiosis system within a year, the other is product quantity-the product mix (weight) produced by the symbiosis system within a year and 2) the selection of system boundaries:when studying symbiotic relationships, a hypothetical reference system should be used, within which the subsystem is mutually independent. The selection of system boundaries should ensure that the two systems under comparison produce the same output; there are two methods of achieving this, attributional process nad consequencial process, which depends on the scale of the research being conducted. Finally, to conduct a more objective evaluation of the benefits of developing industrial symbioses in our country, we propose that the concepts of life cycle assessment and management should be incorporated into the entirety of the planning process, evaluation, and management of ecological industrial parks.