2008 Volume 4 Issue 4 Pages 382-389
Objective. A Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of a personal computer (PC) connected to Internet is required because it is concerned that environmental load will increase by worldwide glowing Internet population. This study was performed as a case study to evaluate the life cycle global warming impact of a PC under internet condition by LCA (with Process Analysis method).
Results and Discussion. The subject PC system was composed of a desktop PC coupled with a 15” liquid crystal display (LCD) and a router. During this study, several key data were obtained such as the foreground data of LSI manufacturing stage, the amount of power consumption of PC during use stage, and some components like CD-ROM, hard disk, keyboard, and so on. By this study it became clear that LSI emitted several hundred times amount green house gas (GHG) of its own weight during production stage, and also that the global warming impact by electrical parts were much higher than materials such as iron and resins. On the other hand, this study revealed the deficiency of the background data of electrical parts like that resistor, transformer, connector and circuit board and so on.
Conclusion. The foreground data of LSI and the data of the components of PC obtained in this study may be very useful for the analyses of many other electric devices. However, the deficiency of the background data of many electric parts was revealed. The background data of the electric parts should be collected more and more.
