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The development of LCA software: AIST-LCA Ver. 5
Kiyotaka Tahara,* AIST
Mitsuo Kobayashi, AIST
Katsuyuki Nakano, JEMAI
Atsushi Inaba, AISTCalculations that involve large amounts of data are normally required when conducting life cycle assesments. By using LCA software, however, it is possible to significantly reduce the amount of labor associated with LCA tasks. AIST-LCA Ver.5 is an LCA software developed by the Research institute of Science for Safety and sustainability, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST). Since AIST-LCA Version 4 was developed in 2005, it has been sold as JEMAI-LCA Pro by the Japan Environmental Management Association for Industry (JEMAI). JEMAI-LCA Pro has been sold over 400, which has maximum penetration ratio in Japan.
Using this LCA software, an LCA conforming to the ISO specifications should be carried out. From “Goal and scope definitions”, “Inventory analysis”, “Impact assessment”, to finally “Interpretation”, each of the steps outlined in the ISO framework will be clearly covered. Following these steps, each screen highlights important points and allows for the input and selection of key information to enable the user to complete an LCA in a straightforward, easy manner.
In this presentation, we introduce the features and new functions of our software as follows:
- Inclusion of the LIME2 (2nd version of Life -cycle Impact assessment Method based on Endpoint modeling) impact assessment method (LIME2 is used to evaluate the damage on endpoints such as human health and ecological risk caused by 13 impact categories, including global warming, human toxicity and resource consumption. It involves disciplines such as natural science; epidemiology, climatology, conservation biology, health statistics and social science; environmental economics, sociology, psychology and others.)
- Introduction of import models in order to trace the flow of goods within a system upstream from country to country
- Ability to split each phase of a system into different stages to be able to analyses each individual stage
- Ability to assess the effectiveness of recycling in a system with the introduction of calculations for closed- and open-loop recycling
- Inclusion of extensive background data for use in assessments
- Inclusion of new electricity data of over 200 countries
* corresponding author: k.tahara@aist.go.jp