Life cycle assessment of eco-designed residential gas appliances

Abstract

LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) has been conducted on residential gas appliances designed based on the eco-design guide that city gas suppliers planned, for certifying validity and clarifying problems of it. In other words, life cycle inventories of these gas appliances were generated, and Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA) was carried out. Five environmental impact categories were considered: "Resources Consumption", "Global Warming", "Acidification", "Energy Consumption", and "Solid Waste". The following results were obtained. Components of residential gas appliances are mostly iron and nonferrous metals. The residential gas appliances designed to be light give lower environmental loads at the production stage than general gas appliances, but occasionally the environmental loads are increased. This suggests there is the trade-off relation between the designing for lightness and the environmental loads depending on the material. It is necessary to develop the optimizing techniques to minimize environment loads when the material is selected. It is necessary to develop a new LCA methodology by which the change of the inventory as time passes is considered with the product that has large environmental loads at the using stage.