The Importance of Local Factors for Inventory Analysis

Abstract

<jats:p>Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) is an important phase of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) that provides information on environmental impact assessment of products throughout their life cycle. Local factors have an effect that can influence the results of an LCI. Many developed countries established their own databases for inventory analysis thus eliminating the issues related with locality. In some of LCA studies, data of similar systems or technologies are considered into inventory calculations. However, there might be mistakes in the inventory analysis results because of the differences between the real system and the system used as a source. Environmental impact assessment is an important selection criterion in the construction sector with different kinds of materials. Turkey has lack of environmental data and is one of the developing countries which has not yet generated a database for the construction materials. In this study, it was aimed to discuss the importance of local factors for LCI. Therefore, environmental information taken from Environmental Product Declaration (EPD) of the ceramic tiles manufactured in different geographical context were compared. It was pointed out the urgency of local inventory data and concluded that the gaps may be minimized with industry involvement.</jats:p>

Environmental Product Declarations as Data Source for the Environmental Assessment of Buildings in the Context of Level(s) and DGNB: How Feasible Is Their Adoption?

“…In DGNB, the goal of the LCA approach is to provide context-specific LCA results [37]. In fact, local context can have an impact on LCA outcomes as highlighted by Karaman Östaş et al [51]. In particular, aspects such as differences in production technology and energy mix, means of transport and distances as well as waste collection and sorting practices at the end of life and disposal or recycling alternatives could affect the environmental profile of the assessed building.…”

“…Furthermore, different PCRs developed and applied by the various program operators show a lack of harmonization in terms of scope and assumptions, which result in a lack of consistency between EPDs as pointed out by Rangelov et al [36]. This highlights not only the necessity of the use of EPDs of products with a local context that relates to the studied object [51], but also the need of a harmonization of PCRs in the long term.…”

“…Therefore, it is very important for scenarios to relate to the real project context, which is still an open issue in the realization of LCA using EPDs as data source. In the literature review, only one reference addressed the importance of local context in connection to LCA data [51]. This work focuses on the impacts at product level.…”