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1.
Montserrat Núñez Stephan Pfister Assumpció Antón Pere Muñoz Stefanie Hellweg Annette Koehler Joan Rieradevall 《Journal of Industrial Ecology》2013,17(1):90-102
The environmental impact of the water consumption of four typical crop rotations grown in Spain, including energy crops, was analyzed and compared against Spanish agricultural and natural reference situations. The life cycle assessment (LCA) methodology was used for the assessment of the potential environmental impact of blue water (withdrawal from water bodies) and green water (uptake of soil moisture) consumption. The latter has so far been disregarded in LCA. To account for green water, two approaches have been applied: the first accounts for the difference in green water demand of the crops and a reference situation. The second is a green water scarcity index, which measures the fraction of the soil‐water plant consumption to the available green water. Our results show that, if the aim is to minimize the environmental impacts of water consumption, the energy crop rotations assessed in this study were most suitable in basins in the northeast of Spain. In contrast, the energy crops grown in basins in the southeast of Spain were associated with the greatest environmental impacts. Further research into the integration of quantitative green water assessment in LCA is crucial in studies of systems with a high dependence on green water resources. 相似文献
2.
Anna?LewandowskaEmail author Zenon?Foltynowicz 《The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment》2004,9(3):180-186
Goal, Scope and Background This paper is the second part of the publication which is devoted to comparative LCA analysis of the industrial pumps. The
previous paper deals with the methodological aspects concerning quality assessment and forms an independent work. This paper
uses practically only the methodological suggestions made there. The main aim of the presented study is to make a comparison
between the industrial pumps which are based on two different technologies. The Life Cycle Assessment method is used to check
whether the differences of the manufacturing processes influence the level of the potential environmental impact during the
whole life cycle of the analysed products.
Methods The Life Cycle Assessment is carried out using the Ecoindicator99 method. Additionally, an extensive quality analysis of the
LCA study is made (Part I). To make the process of an identification of the data easier and faster, they are assigned to a
special data documentation form. To ensure the credibility of the LCA results different methods of interpretation are used.
Results and Discussion The LCA analysis shows clear superiority of the pumps manufactured using modern technology. It seems that this superiority
results not only from the differences in the emissions, but also from different characteristics of effectiveness in the usage
stage. Thanks to the uncertainty analysis, each LCA result is provided with the range of uncertainty.
Conclusions The LCA results are supported by different techniques of interpretation: the sensitivity-, the contribution-, the comparative-,
the discernability- and the uncertainty analysis. There is strong evidence of the superiority of the pumps based on the modern
technology.
Recommendations and Outlook The main source of the environmental impact in the case of pumps is the usage stage and the consumption of energy. That is
why it should be the main area to improve. The LCA results show that actions taken in the usage stage and energy consumption
can lead to a considerable reduction of the environmental impacts. 相似文献
3.
Nobuhiko?NaritaEmail author Yoshifumi?Nakahara Mamoru?Morimoto Ryosuke?Aoki Shigeru?Suda 《The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment》2004,9(6):355-359
In 1998, the Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry (METI) launched a five-year national project entitled ‘Development
of Life Cycle Impact Assessment for Products’ (commonly known as ‘the LCA Project’). The purpose of the project is to develop
common LCA methodology as well as a highly reliable database that can be shared in Japan. Activities over these five years
have resulted in the supply of LCI data on some 250 products. Industrial associations voluntarily provided data. The results
of these activities are currently being made available on the Internet on a trial basis in the form of an LCA database. In
addition, a method entitled ‘Life-cycle Impact assessment Method based on Endpoint modeling (LIME)’ was developed. It is expected
that these results will be widely used in Japan in the future. This paper presents an outline of the results of the research
and development that has been conducted in the LCA Project in Japan. 相似文献
4.
Stefanie?HellwegEmail author Thomas?B.?Hofstetter Konrad?Hungerbuhler 《The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment》2003,8(1):8-18
Background In Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA), decision makers are often faced with tradeoffs between current and future impacts. One typical
example is waste incineration, where immediate emissions to the air from the incineration process have to be weighted against
future emissions of slag landfills. Long-term impacts are either completely taken into account or they are entirely disregarded
in case of a temporal cut-off. Temporal cutoffs are a special case of discounting.
Objective In this paper, discounting is defined as valuing damages differently at different points of time using a positive or negative
discount rate. Apart from temporal cut-offs, discounting has rarely been applied in LCA so far. It is the goal of this paper
to discuss the concept of discounting and its applicability in the context of LCA.
Methods For this purpose, we first review the arguments for discounting and its principles in economic sciences. Discounting in economics
can be motivated by pure time preference, productivity of capital, diminishing marginal utility of consumption, and uncertainties.
The nominal discount rate additionally includes changes in the price level. These arguments and their justification are discussed
in the context of environmental impacts harming future generations.
Results and Discussion It is concluded that discounting across generations because of pure time preference contradicts fundamental ethical values
and should therefore not be applied in LCA. However, it has to be acknowledged that in practice decision makers often use
positive discount rates because of pure time preference — either because they might profit from imposing environmental damage
on others instead of themselves or because people in the far future are not of immediate concern to them. Discounting because
of the productivity of capital assumes a relationship between monetary values and environmental impact. If such a relationship
is accepted, discounting could be applied. However, future generations should be compensated for the environmental damage.
It is likely that they would demand a higher compensation if the real per capita income increases. As both the compensation
and the discount rate are related to economic growth, the overall discount rate might be close to zero. It is shown that the
overall discount rate might even be negative considering that the required compensation could increase (even to infinite)
if natural assets remain scarce, whereas the utility of consumption diminishes with increasing income. Uncertainties could
justify both positive and negative discount rates. Since the relationship between uncertainties and the magnitude of damage
is generally not exponential, we recommend to model changes in the magnitude of damage in scenario analysis instead of considering
it in discounting (which requires an exponential function of time in the case of a constant discount rate). We investigated
the influence of discounting in a case study of heavy metal emissions from slag landfills. It could be shown that even small
discount rates of less than 1 % lead to a significant reduction of the impact score, whereas negative discount rates inflate
the results.
Conclusions and Recommendations Discounting is only applicable when temporally differentiated data is available. In some cases, such a temporal differentiation
is necessary to take sound decisions, especially when long emission periods are involved. An example is the disposal of nuclear
or heavy metal-containing waste. In these cases, the results might completely depend on the discount rate. This paper helps
to structure arguments and thus to support the decision about whether or not discounting should be applied in an LCA. 相似文献
5.
6.
Bruno Notarnicola Gjalt Huppes Nico W. van den Berg 《The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment》1998,3(5):289-300
LCA aims to help direct decisions in an environmentally sustainable direction. It indicates the environmental effects of choices
and evaluates these against this background. Approaches to evaluation in LCA differ substantially, related to the way of modelling
environmental effects and to the way these effects are combined into an overall judgement on alternative options. Several
approaches are now operational, which are linked to different paradigms in decision making. It is shown that the choice of
paradigm is quite decisive on the outcome of the analysis. Also within similar paradigms, different methods now operational
may lead to different outcomes. These latter differences may be alleviated more easily than those related to paradigmatic
choices, as they are partly a matter of refinement, and they partly result from legitimate differences in subjective priorities.
The more basic paradigmatic differences can hardly be bridged. The practical relevancy of the subject is proven by applying
different operational methods to one case, showing widely differing outcomes. The paradigm behind evaluating environmental
effects is either values based, directly or through policy decisions, or economics based, as individual preferences measured
in the monetary terms of willingness-to-pay. Accordingly, the different methods are “policy-oriented” or “monetary”. It may
be doubted if the differences between these can be overcome in standardisation. 相似文献
7.
《Journal of Industrial Ecology》2004,8(1-2):11-21
Land use is an increasingly important component of sustainability evaluations, and numerous performance metrics have evolved to meet this need. The selection of appropriate land-use metrics for decision makers, however, remains an ongoing challenge. Additionally, life-cycle practitioners often struggle to provide meaningful impact assessment because of challenges associated with traditional land-use impact metrics. This article is intended to assist decision makers and life-cycle practitioners who wish to more effectively measure and evaluate one aspect of land use: surface area occupation. Existing performance metrics are discussed, and the specific circumstances under which each is appropriate are identified. Building on leading-edge research and analysis in the field of life-cycle impact assessment, a modified methodology for evaluating surface area occupation is proposed. This approach is demonstrated for a series of mining practices including three individual gold mines, a bauxite mine, and a copper mine. The specific data requirements and resulting equivalency factors for each mine are discussed. Results indicate that equivalency factors for gold (average of 700 acre-yr/ton) are expected to be several orders of magnitude higher than for either bauxite (0.004 acre-yr/ ton) or copper (0.03 acre-yr/ton). These dramatic differences in results demonstrate that equivalency factors are appropriate and necessary for including land-use impact potential as part of a life-cycle assessment that includes several different minerals or material requirements. 相似文献
8.
Ivan Muñoz Llorenç Milà‐i‐Canals Amadeo R. Fernández‐Alba 《Journal of Industrial Ecology》2010,14(6):902-918
Life cycle assessment (LCA) was used to compare the current water supply planning in Mediterranean Spain, the so‐called AGUA Programme, with its predecessor, the Ebro river water transfer (ERWT). Whereas the ERWT was based on a single interbasin transfer, the AGUA Programme excludes new transfers and focuses instead on different types of resources, including seawater and brackish water desalination and wastewater reuse, among others. The study includes not only water supply but the whole anthropic cycle of water, from water abstraction to wastewater treatment. In addition to standard LCA impact categories, a specific impact category focusing on freshwater resources is included, which takes into account freshwater scarcity in the affected water catchments. In most impact categories the AGUA Programme obtains similar or even lower impact scores than ERWT. Concerning impacts on freshwater resources, the AGUA Programme obtains an impact score 49% lower than the ERWT. Although the current water planning appears to perform better in many impact categories than its predecessor, this study shows that water supply in Spanish Mediterranean regions is substantially increasing its energy intensity and that Mediterranean basins suffer a very high level of water stress due to increasing demand and limited resources. 相似文献
9.
When one models impact pathways due to stressors that are caused by the provision of product systems, it results in indicators for environmental damages. These indicators are incommensurable and cannot be compared per se. For example, the statistical life years lost for a human population cannot necessarily be compared with the potentially affected fraction of species within an ecosystem. However, some decision makers who use life-cycle assessment (LCA) prefer a single index, because it facilitates interpretation better than a multi-indicator system. This requires a method for aggregating environmental damages of differing types, thereby confronting LCA with a valuation problem.
The article describes a nonmonetary approach to valuation in LCA that incorporates the findings of a survey among LCA practitioners and users. The survey focuses on the weighting of three safeguard subjects for Eco-indicator 99, a damage-oriented impact-assessment method: human health, ecosystem quality, and resources. Of particular interest here is what influence the context provided in the survey (framing) and an individual's characteristics have on his or her weighting of environmental damages. The results indicate that damages on the European level are easier to compare than damages on a micro level. Additionally, although only half of the survey participants could be classified unequivocally into one of three cultural perspectives, each perspective rated the damage categories presented to them significantly differently from the others. Our conclusions were that framing effects need to be more carefully considered in weighting procedures and that weighting preferences vary significantly according to a group's archetypical attitudes. 相似文献
The article describes a nonmonetary approach to valuation in LCA that incorporates the findings of a survey among LCA practitioners and users. The survey focuses on the weighting of three safeguard subjects for Eco-indicator 99, a damage-oriented impact-assessment method: human health, ecosystem quality, and resources. Of particular interest here is what influence the context provided in the survey (framing) and an individual's characteristics have on his or her weighting of environmental damages. The results indicate that damages on the European level are easier to compare than damages on a micro level. Additionally, although only half of the survey participants could be classified unequivocally into one of three cultural perspectives, each perspective rated the damage categories presented to them significantly differently from the others. Our conclusions were that framing effects need to be more carefully considered in weighting procedures and that weighting preferences vary significantly according to a group's archetypical attitudes. 相似文献
10.
Life cycle impact of emissions, energy requirements, and exergetic losses are calculated for a novel process for producing titanium dioxide nanoparticles from an ilmenite feedstock. The Altairnano hydrochloride process analyzed is tailored for the production of nanoscale particles, unlike established commercial processes. The life cycle energy requirements for the production of these particles is compared with that of traditional building materials on a per unit mass basis. The environmental impact assessment and energy analysis results both emphasize the use of nonrenewable fossil fuels in the upstream life cycle. Exergy analysis shows fuel losses to be secondary to material losses, particularly in the mining of ilmenite ore. These analyses are based on the same inventory data. The main contributions of this work are to provide life cycle inventory of a nanomanufacturing process and reveal potential insights from exergy analysis that are not available from other methods. 相似文献