Life Cycle Assessment of Domestic Waste Disposal System in Consideration of Facility Scale and Transportation Distance

Abstract

In this paper, we report an application of LCA to regional measures about a domestic waste disposal system of northern Iwate Prefecture in order to evaluate regional environmental impact. In application to a domestic waste disposal system, the inventories according to facility scale and the geographic information database of transportation paths were fixed focusing needs of facility scale and transportation distance. The fixed database was analyzed and it suggested that the result of LCA might change with facility scale. From the result of LCA, it was estimated that the plan increases CO₂ by 19.8% and the amount of environmental emissions from the background, which was not evaluated by the conventional environmental impact assessment, was quantified for every process. Moreover, analysis based on the geographic information database enabled the calculation of environmental burden for every area.