LCA evaluation of reuse/recycle impact for environmental conscious industrial products

An industrial activity like manufacturing products inevitably results in some load on the environment such as fossil fuel depletion, global warming, air pollution, etc. Owing to the new sensitivity arising towards the environment, reuse and recycling of products have to be regarded as important. However, no numerical environmental impact analyses of reuse and recycling have been expressed. As a tool that estimates numerical environmental impacts caused by different environmental problems through the entire life cycle (cradle to grave) of industrial products, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has been greatly paid attention. In this paper, we have evaluated the environmental impacts of reuse for vending machine and recycling for PET bottle by the aid of the LCA-NETS (Numerical Eco-load Total Standard) software that we have newly proposed as a LCA scheme to analyze quantitatively environmental loads of any industrial products. As the result, it is clarified that LCA-NETS software is found to be a powerful tool to analyze the quantitative LCA environmental loads for various industrial products and that reuse and recycling of products are greatly needed for ECP (environmentally conscious products).