2005 Volume 91 Issue 1 Pages 127-134
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a useful tool to evaluate environmental impacts associated with products during their life cycle. However, it has been recognized that LCA has a limitation in assessing open cycle recycling of materials because of inevitable subjective judgments in setting system boundary. According with the enforcement of recycling laws, there has been a rapid increase in recycling ratio of materials at the end-of-life of products in Japan. So, materials' life cycle is getting more complicated, which makes it difficult to quantify the environmental impacts of materials used in a product in an appropriate way. This paper reviews this limitation of conventional LCA and suggests a new methodology for assessing open cycle recycling of materials. The new tool is called "Strategic Integrated LCA Technology for sustainable society, SILT", in which LCA is integrated with population balance model and pinch technology. This tool deals with dynamic aspects of recycling materials and has macro point of view. One can assess the maximum recyclable ratio of the scrap materials and total environmental impacts caused by the material production in asociety in each year. In addition, reduction potential of environmental impacts by theintroduction of new technology, such as DfE, can be quantified by this tool.
