環境IO応用LCAソフトウェアEasy-LCA

抄録

Environmentally conscious design, also known as eco-design, is essential for realizing sustainable manufacturing. For the past several years, Toshiba has been developing design methods and tools to support eco-design based on a life cycle approach. This paper describes “Easy-LCA,” life cycle assessment（LCA）software based on an environmental input-output（IO）database, and presents an application example. In general, an IO-based LCA database is certified from the viewpoint of system boundary. One of the features of our LCA database is that the number of inventory data items is the largest among IO-based LCA database systems developed in Japan.

Therefore, this software tool is particularly useful when life cycle inventory（LCI）data are applied in life cycle impact assessment（LCIA）. In the application example, the Easy-LCA database was utilized to calculate the environmental impact of a refrigerator. Also, an overview of a new LCA database using the year 2000 version of the Japanese IO table is introduced.