1999 Volume 40 Issue 4 Pages 204-209
Recently, environmental protection has become one of the most critical concerns in the global scale. Currently, it is widely recognized that life cycle assessment (LCA) is a very effective instrument to quantitatively evaluate environmental impact of various products across their whole lifecycle. LCA itself is not yet established as a well defined method, but already finding a wide range of applications in electric appliances, automobiles and other industrial products. We conducted a basic survey for LCA of Shinkansen vehicles, as a case study for the railway system. As a result of this survey, we could obtain useful knowledge for applying LCA to the railway.