Abstract
With becoming widespread of Information Technology (IT), increase of resource and energy consumption has been anxious which caused by manufacturing or using Personal Computer (PC), Server and so on. Then, SI-LCA (System Integration -LCA) which is an environmental-impact-assessment technique and a program was developed for the purpose of evaluating quantitatively the environmental load of a SI product which is a kind of IT. In this definition, SI product is Information Products and Services.
In this technique, the both a hardware product and a software product, which constitute a SI product are objects for evaluation. And so, a life cycle of a SI product was defined newly, which has a total of ten stages, as a system boundary. For instance, a “design / development” of a software product was added to the general life cycle of a hardware product. Furthermore, a method about calculation of CO2 emissions for a software product was developed. In this method, that is computed from CO2 emissions exhausted from office and the ratio of design / development expense for a SI product to the total sales.
This technique was applied to the electronic forms system with the data management by the server, and reference / search function by PC which was introduced into the supermarket. As a result of comparing with the management by the conventional printed matter, about 82% of CO2 emissions reduction effect was achieved.
