Objective. The objective of this study is to comprehend how much environment-related issues are dealt in the current home economics in full detail to examine the possibility of introducing Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) into curriculum of home economics. The authors applied text mining to plural home economics textbooks from the elementary school to the high school to clarify the difference of use of the environment-related elements - “sustainable society”, “LCA” etc. In addition, the difference among schools and publishing companies were also analyzed.
Results and Discussion. “Daily life” and “family” were the main topic of elementary school and “environment” was also included in it and “environment” was strongly connected with word “think.” In junior high school, “environment” was treated in the family life in the community and had a tendency to be connected with consumption behavior in real life. In high school, there were not many words that had strong ties with “environment” and “environment” came to be treated broader in the various issues of whole society. The word “green consumer” was appeared once in the junior high school textbook, and the word “LCA” was appeared for the first time in the high school textbook. Both were seen only just with the explanation of the concepts. While environmental concepts were linked close to concrete daily actions at the junior high school, the link became weakened at the high school. A problem of missing link that environmental education did not lead to behavioral change was implicated.
Conclusions. The current work showed that the textbook or the curriculum of junior high school seemed most appropriate to adopt LCA to promote environmental-friendly actions because “environment” was treated as a close issue as daily activities, especially consumption behaviors. It can be also proposed to increase more practical contents which connect an environment concept to a concrete action in the textbook of the high school where “LCA” was first appeared.

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Objective. In our study, we aim to analyze effective learning methods of energy and environmental education for changing energy saving behavior of children and households.
Results and Discussion. We implemented energy and environmental education to 937 children of 15 elementary and junior high schools in Tokyo, fiscal year 2012. We investigated the relationship between learning method of education and degree of changing energy saving behavior of households and children. According to the results, discussion activities and expression to the home improve the energy saving behavior of both children and households by facilitating communication.
Conclusions. In elementary and junior high schools, teachers have little time to study material and implement environmental education. Because teachers can implement in small time, we suggest discussion activities, which have a spillover effect for improving energy saving behavior in homes by environmental education in elementary and junior high schools.

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Objective. A Water Footprint (WF) can be expressed as the potential impacts calculated based on the consumed amount of water or the quality of degraded water through the entire life cycle of products/services/organizations. The principles, requirements and guidelines of water footprinting have been established as an international standard. According to the draft of the international standard, various elementary flows such as the quantity of water used, type of water resource, type of water appropriation, quality of water, geographical location of water withdrawal and return flows are required to be considered in a water inventory. This study distinguishes the type of water resource and the form of water use in a water inventory database. However, most existing water footprint inventory databases have not dealt with the quality of water. The purpose of this study was to develop a water footprint inventory database that will make it possible to evaluate water degradation.
Results and Discussion. The amounts of Nitrogen (N) and Phosphorus (P) in discharged water were selected as inventory items representing water degradation. The amounts of these substances in discharged water were converted to potential impacts on the environment. The volume of dilution water needed to bring the levels of degradation to the accepted quality level in the environmental regulations was calculated for representing the potential impacts. Input-output analysis was adopted to obtain water intensity for 403 industrial sectors from cradle to gate. The volume of dilution water required in secondary industries was estimated to be higher than those in other industries. For primary industries, the study revealed that agricultural crops required large amount of dilution water because of the larger indirect demand of dilution water in secondary industries in the upstream of the supply chain. The inventory data for tertiary industries were influenced by the degree of demand in the sewage sector. Comparing the intensities of consumed water and dilution water in each industry, dilution water was generally more dominant than consumed water in secondary industries. On the other hand, consumed water was more dominant in primary industries due to the large demand of water input and the relationship of them in tertiary industries was depending on the relations to secondary industries in the upstream of the supply chain.
Conclusions. The output of this study, a database of water inventories, includes achieves to include the aspects of water degradation in water footprinting by representing potential impacts from N and P emission in discharged water. This database enables practitioners to carry out water footprint analyses following the requirements in the ISO standard draft. While the database in this study was developed based on the average data for the whole Japanese activities, geographical location will also be an important aspect for assessing potential impacts of water use as mentioned in the ISO standard draft of water footprinting. The distinction of geographical location of inventory and other emission substances in addition to N and P need to be considered in the future studies.

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Objective. The objective of this research is to analyze the environmental impact of printed matter using rice ink with the consideration of the impact of land use change and using reclaimed vegetable oil based on LCA method.
Method. Several scenarios changing the raw materials (soy oil, recycled oil, rice bran) have prepared and evaluated environmental impacts of printed matter. 1000 print for A4 size paper was adopted as functional unit. System boundary in this study covered manufacturing raw materials, mixture, making ink, pulp production, printing and transportation. Recycling paper and disposal of used paper were excluded from the scope. Primary data was collected for the process of making ink in this study. Impact assessment was also applied as well as inventory analysis. Damage assessment and weighting were applied so that potential environmental impacts of several impact categories can be compared. LIME2 was adopted to carry out LCIA.
Results and Discussion. A LCA of printed matter using soy ink and rice ink was carried out by using MiLCA software. With regard to the result of LCA for paper with ink, environmental impact of paper occupied the almost of total regardless of the types of ink. When we compared the environmental impacts between the inks, we found that environmental impact of rice ink was smaller than that of the other types of inks. Impact of land use for rice ink was smaller than the others, because allocated area for cultivating rice bran (co-product of polished rice) was estimated smaller. Furthermore, the use of reclaimed oil enables to decrease of land use impacts. On the other hand, environmental impact of soy ink is almost equal with that of conventional ink, because the land use area for cultivating soy beans are higher than that rice bran.
Conclusions. Using reclaimed oil and co-products for raw material are key points for the reduction of environmental impacts of inks. We found that rice oil taking the both advantages make possible to reduce environmental impacts to ecosystem.

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