Abstract
Recently, Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been attracting people's attention who have been concerned in the global environmental problems as an method that can assess the environmental impacts of materials, products, several social services and so on. LCA is a tool to evaluate the environmental impacts of a product or activity, across its entire life. But the conventional LCA can not asses the effect of use of recyclable materials into the products adequately. A purpose of this study is to propose a new evaluation method of the process of recycle. The new evaluation method assess the environmental impact of the following three processes; a) Process of waste disintegration, waste incineration and final waste disposal, b) Process of a product manufacturing from natural resources, c) Process of re-manufacturing a product from recycled materials. An effect of the recycle of an electric washing machine on the reducing environmental impacts is evaluated with our evaluation method. It became clear that if we use the new evaluation method, we evaluate reducing the environmental impact by recycle more adequately than before.
