Development of Local Weighting Factors in the Context of LCIA

Abstract

Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) is a phase of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) in order to quantify various environmental impacts based on the inventory analysis. Weighting although is not the mandatory element of LCIA is the element in which local data becomes important. Potential environmental impacts and the importance of particular impacts can be quite significant among the countries or regions. Determination of the importance degree is possible by weighting of the selected environmental impact categories. Therefore, this study aimed to develop local weighting factors (WFs) by taking the environmental issues into consideration for the building materials produced in Turkey. And 11 environmental impact categories such as global warming, ozone depletion, acidification, photochemical ozone formation, eutrophication, fossil fuel depletion, mineral resource depletion, water depletion, land use, indoor air quality and waste were selected considering environmental impacts caused by the building materials and environmental issues in Turkey. And WFs of these categories for Turkey were determined by using a panel approach. Thus, it can be possible to assess environmental impacts of building materials by using local data.

An integrated environmental and health performance quantification model for pre-occupancy phase of buildings in China

“…This weighting method has been used successfully in BELES (Gu et al, 2008a), the green construction assessment method (Tam et al, 2004), EI99 and the construction pollution index (Chen et al, 2000). Although the panel method is straightforward to use, the weighting factors may differ considerably between the individuals in a panel due to the subjective nature of value choices (Myllyviita et al, 2014;Oztas and Tanacan, 2014). Furthermore, the panel size is not always sufficient to ensure the representativeness of the survey results (Itsubo et al, 2012).…”

Sustainable Manufacturing Processes of Building Materials: Energy Efficiency

“…Turkey imports a large percentage of fossil fuels and is depended on foreign energy, so fossil fuel depletion becomes an important impact category. In the study about weighting of the environmental impact categories for Turkey, fossil fuel depletion and global warming are respectively grouped as high risk environmental issues [5].…”