Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Table 4.2
Examples of goals, scopes, functional units, and boundaries of selected LCAs.
Process or product
Goal and scope
Functional unit
Boundary
Reference
Basic lager beer
To assess the potential
environmental effects of the
different stages of the beer life
cycle and to also obtain new and
updated information for
establishing a new facility
505 multi-6-packs of
bottled beer (10 hi of
beer) in the shop
Inputs and outputs from agricultural processes (irrigation,
fertilization, erosion, etc.), cultivation and harvesting of the
barley, malting, beer and auxiliary material production,
packaging (including washing of refillable glass bottles) and
transportation. Production of heat, electricity and pretreatment
of raw water were also included in this analysis.
Talve, 2001
Saling et al.,
2002
Assessment of
different reuse
percentages for glass
beer bottles
To assess the environmental
impacts through the life cycle of
returnable and nonreturnable
glass beer bottles comparing
different reuse percentages
The delivery of 330
liters of beer to the
consumer, which
corresponds to 1000
bottles (including
returnable and
nonreturnable bottles).
The system boundary includes the raw material acquisition,
glass bottle manufacture, cleaning, filling, closure, pasteuriz-
ing, labeling, packaging, distribution, reuse, recycling,
transportation of empty bottles from the bottle producer to the
brewery, distribution of filled bottles to the consumer, return of
bottles to refill and culler to recycle.
Mata and
Costa, 2001
Pasta production in
Italy
To evaluate the environmental
performances of the production
and the distribution of durum
wheat pasta, in the Italian
market
0.5-kg package of a
popular brand of
durum wheat pasta
(i.e., functional unit)
sold in the Italian
market
LCA was performed following a second-order approach,
including in the system's boundaries, all the stages of the life
cycle from the cultivation of wheat up to the final consumption
of pasta. On the contrary, the environmental impact due to the
production of capital goods, the use of ancillary materials and
the need of recurrent maintenance operations was neglected.
Agricultural areas were regarded as part of the production
systems and thus, only the fertilizers and the pesticides that
leached out, evaporated or that were accidentally sprayed
outside of the agricultural fields were counted as an emission
in the external environment. Please note that, however,
according to the second-order approach, the impact due to the
production of the complete amount of fertilizers and pesticides
(used in the wheat fields) was considered in the analysis.
Bevilacqua
et al., 2007
Soybean oil
production
To study the three stages of
soybean oil production: preproc-
essing, extraction and separation,
and postprocessing. To compare
the extraction with hexane and
supercritical carbon dioxide
1 metric ton soybean oil
production per hour
The system boundary includes three stages of soybean oil
processing: preprocessing, extraction and separation, and
postprocessing. Transportation and energy supply are also
included in this study.
Yong et al.,
2006
