Page 246 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

230 4 Life Cycle Impact Assessment

Land uses of high impact and frequently applied in LCAs are cultivated areas
particularly of agriculture and forestry, mining areas (especially open cast mining),
traffic and dumping areas.
The collection of this information in the inventory can be quite laborious.
Land use with relevant environmental impacts is however of great importance
for both LCAs on nutrition and on renewable raw materials and should under
no circumstances be neglected. Examples of renewable raw materials playing an
important role in many product systems are wood (e.g. building products and
cardboard, paper), oil seeds, sugar cane, sugar beet (e.g. fuel and lubricant) or corn
(input material for agragas plants). 143) In addition, infrastructure areas including
traffic routes and flooded areas for hydro-electric power plants are to be considered.
In the latter case ongoing releases for many years of CO and CH by decomposition
2
4
of flooded biomass must also be considered (see ‘Climate change’).
As soon as every area is quantified by space (F ) and the utilisation period is
i
determined, the impact indicator is formed by multiplication. Areas of the same
hemerobic level are added up (Equation 4.10), the results of different hemerobic
levels are however not aggregated.
2
−1
Area specifications for relevant inventory data (m afU ) if necessary by
conversion or estimation must be assigned to the selected hemerobic level of the
impact assessment. Without further aggregation this results in

Land use = ∑ (F × utilisation period)(m a)
2
i
i
(for each hemerobic level) i (4.10)

F : area of hemerobic level i (1–7) per fU
i
Utilisation period: time used to produce the quantity of material or energy
needed per fU.
The evaluation according to Equation 4.10 thus does not provide a total ‘naturalness
score’.
Brentrup et al. (2002b, loc. cit.) define a ‘naturalness degradation potential (NDP)’
linearly increasing with hemerobic level from zero (hemerobic level 1 = H0) to one
(hemerobic level 7 = H10) in order to obtain a cardinal scale. The designations
H0 to H10 refer to the 11-level scale preferred by the authors. Similar to most
scoring systems this weighting is arbitrary and serves only for a better adap-
tion to the usual characterisation applied in other impact categories (inventory
result × characterising factor = impact indicator result). Following the arguments
of the authors the NDP (i = type of use) can be used as characterisation factor for
area × time (Equation 4.11):
NDI = ∑ (F × duration of use i) NDP (m a) (4.11)
2
i
i
i
143) Faulstich and Greiff (2008).