Page 212 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

196 4 Life Cycle Impact Assessment

Example 3

Specific contribution or resident equivalents for the annual production of the
examined product system
In the sense of the standards relatively descriptive results can easily be obtained
by a deviation from the functional unit considering an annual production of the
examined product system instead. This is easily done with simple fUs and available
statistical data by multiplication. Here, it must be remebered that the Dutch LCA-
38)
guidelines recommend the annual production as the fU for detailed LCAs; in this
case the conversion would be unnecessary.
Normalisation of the annual production by the specific contribution of the category
indicator result of CO -equivalents:
2
Category indicator result CO -equivalent Normalised value
2
Emission caused Number of fU Emissions caused Reference value Specific contribution
by the product produced per by annual annual emissions of annual
system per fU annum production in Germany production

500 kg 1.00E+07 5.00E+09 kg 1.02E+12 kg 4.91E−03 equal to 0.49%

Normalisation of the annual production per resident equivalents of the category
indicator result of CO -equivalents:
2
Category indicator result CO -equivalent Normalised value
2
Emission caused Number of fU Emissions caused Reference value Resident equivalents
by the product produced per by annual annual releases (REQ) per
system per fU annum production per average inhabitant annual production
in Germany

500 kg 1.00E+07 5.00E+09 kg 1.23E+04 kg/ 4.05E+05
inhabitant inhabitants

With normalisation of the annual production by resident equivalents the descrip-
tiveness increases considerably: The fictitious product system serving as example
causes as many emissions of GHG per annual production, measured as category
indicator CO -equivalent as 405 000 average inhabitants. Interpretation should,
2
however, be done cautiously since the REQ is a calculated figure whereby the
entire industrial production of the product investigated is assigned to inhabitants.
If a reference region is thickly populated, but exhibits lower industrialisation than,

38) Guin´ ee et al. (2002).