2013 Volume 92 Issue 10 Pages 994-1005
Efforts to make effective use of biomass resources on a regional basis have been promoted in Japan. Although it is expected that these efforts have positive influences on environment and socio-economic aspects, the sound methodologies to evaluate the impacts in objective manners are yet to be proposed. In addition, in terms of the projects utilizing waste biomass, which is general case in Japan, the characteristics of waste biomass should be taken into consideration of the evaluation methodology. This study aims at providing methodology to evaluate environmental impacts suitable for waste biomass projects. Fossil fuel consumption, GHG emissions and final waste volume are chosen as environmental indices and their estimation methodologies are proposed based on input-output tables. The methodology proposed is applied to the waste biomass project at Miura Prefecture as a case study. The results reveal that the project has positive effects on all the indices. In addition, a scenario analysis is carried out to evaluate GHG emissions associated with the waste treatment of unused amount of fertilizer that is produced from the target project, whose result indicates that emissions by incineration of surplus fertilizer does not affect to the total GHG reduction of the project.
