Life Cycle Assessment and Its Application

전과정 평가 기법과 활용

LCA is a tool to support for making decisions by offering information of environmental aspects of products or services. It can be used to make decisions to consumers and NGOs as well as government and enterprises. LCA evaluates the environmental aspects throughout the entire life cycle of a product. Therefore it can quantify and assess environmental impacts from raw material acquisition, manufacturing, distribution, use and disposal to end of life and recycling. The demands of the recycling rate increase and the use of suitable materials for RoHS, REACH, WEEE, ELV which are linked trade with environmental regulation have increased the worldwide. Global warming is the critical challenge of the world facing. And under post-Kyoto protocol each country has to prepare for target reduction, so it became essential to save energy and resources. In addition that, the carbon mark has been run as the way of showing example of CO2 reduction in domestic and it will be extended gradually. And also through the introduction of Eco-label, environmentally-friendly product will be promoted. When those systems are operated, global warming gases (i.e. CO2) can be calculated throughout the entire life of the products by LCA. And the environmental impacts such as harmful material emission in the process of manufacturing, energy consumption, distribution and so on, can also be assessed. Therefore, The basic concepts of LCA technique and various cases and the practical application in the future will be review in this study.