Railway industry and Life Cycle Assessment(LCA)

철도산업과 전과정평가(LCA)

Life cycle assessment(LCA) has been developed from the concept of life cycle thinking. Life cycle thinking implies that everyone in the whole chain of a product's life cycle, from cradle to grave, has a responsibility and a role to play, taking into account all the relevant external effects. LCA is an analytical tool for identifying environmental loads and assessing the environmental impact in the whole chain of a product's life cycle. In Europe and Japan, LCA and ecodesign study for railway industry have been actively carried out recently. However, LCA for railway industry in domestic is still infant. LCA is standardized in International Organization of Standardization(ISO), base on the ISO 14040 standards, 307 life cycle inventory(LCI) database for infrastructure and base materials have been established in total since 1999. Some of LCI database can use in performing LCA for trains and railway infrastructure, but still not enough to derive accurate LCA result. Therefore, railway oriented LCA methodology and LCI DB are needed to be developed.