Page 25 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

Life Cycle Assessment: Principles, Practice and Prospects
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to deal with a broad range of waste management issues including greenhouse gas emissions,
aimed to develop policies and programs required to reduce the volume of waste going to
landfill and to ensure the management of waste occurs in a manner that promotes optimal
environmental outcomes including the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (The State of
Victoria 2005). The strategy considered waste from a variety of sources including municipal,
commercial and industrial, and construction and demolition waste. EcoRecycle Victoria then
commissioned two further LCAs: the first to evaluate the environmental impacts of a range of
waste management scenarios, and the second to examine the environmental benefits of recy-
cling construction and demolition, and commercial and industrial waste, such as concrete,
timber, bricks, used tyres and batteries. Each of these major studies allowed for the quantifica-
tion of the benefits and impacts of recycling waste materials, and they have been used to guide
policy development in addition to being used as a communication tool.

2.1.4 Greenhouse issues
The Commonwealth Government’s 1998 National Greenhouse Strategy, Measure 4.17 ‘Life
cycle energy analysis’, states:
Life cycle energy issues will be pursued through the following actions (a)
governments, in consultation with industry, will develop a database and nationally
accepted methodology for life cycle energy analysis and (b) based on these life cycle
analyses, policies/programs will be developed and implemented to encourage
producer responsibility for sourcing of materials, product design and manufacture,
product operating efficiencies and product disposal, as a means of improving
greenhouse outcomes (AGO 1998, pp. 50–1).
In realising the strategy, a scoping study was undertaken to establish what a life cycle energy
database and methodology might look like (Lundie et al. 2001). The study recommended that the
AGO should concentrate its efforts on having full LCAs undertaken in the Australian context to
support the development of data quality criteria and the initiation and implementation of a
nationally accepted LCA database. The project stalled amid valid concerns about creating a life
cycle database that only considered greenhouse and energy issues and not a fuller range of life
cycle issues. In 2003, the AGO developed the Greenhouse Friendly™ program that certifies
products and services as being ‘carbon neutral’. The method involves undertaking a greenhouse
gas emission LCA of a product or service and then offsetting the greenhouse emissions with cer-
tified greenhouse gas abatement options (see Chapter 10 for a further examination).

2.1.5 Biofuels
In 1999, then Australian Prime Minister Mr Howard stated that the AGO may certify addi-
tional fuels to diesel as being eligible under the Diesel and Alternative Fuels Grants Scheme.
This prompted the AGO to commission an LCA by CSIRO and research partners to compare
road transport fuel emissions, including but not limited to greenhouse gas emissions, to deter-
mine which fuels were appropriate to be certified under the scheme. A scoping study was con-
ducted in 2000 (Beer et al. 2000). This study reviewed earlier studies conducted in the United
States of America (USA) and Europe on fuels including biodiesel. The scoping study led to a
full fuel-cycle analysis of alternative fuels to compare their emissions of greenhouse gases and
other air toxins (Beer et al. 2001). The fuel against which other fuels were compared was low
sulphur diesel, and the fuels examined were:
s diesel fuels
s biodiesel and canola oil – the biodiesel came from five upstream sources: canola, soy
and rape crops, tallow and waste cooking oil

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