Author: Muhammad Ahmad
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Life Cycle Impact Assessment
The LCIA phase is the evaluation of potential human health and environmental impacts of the environmental resources and releases identified during the LCI. Impact assessment should address ecological and human health effects; it can also address resource depletion. An LCIA attempts to establish a linkage between the product or process and its potential environmental impacts.…
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Life Cycle Inventory
A life cycle inventory (LCI) quantifies energy and raw material requirements, atmospheric emissions, waterborne emissions, solid wastes, and other releases for the entire life cycle of a product, process, or activity (USEPA 1993). Such an inventory is in the form of a list of the quantities of pollutants released to the environment and the amounts of…
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Accuracy Required of the Data
The required level of data accuracy for the project depends on the use of the final results and the intended audience. (Will the results be used to support decision making in an internal process? In a public forum?) For example, if the intent is to use the results in a public forum to support product/process…
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Conducting an LCA
To see the interrelatedness of the four components of an LCA, it is useful to refer to the flowchart shown in Figure 6.2. Goal Definition and Scoping The LCA process can be used to determine the potential environmental impacts from any product, process, or service. The goal definition and scoping phase will determine the time and…
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What Is Life Cycle Assessment?
As environmental awareness increases, industries and businesses have started to assess how their activities affect the environment. Society has become concerned about the issues of natural resource depletion and environmental degradation. Many businesses and industries have responded to this awareness by providing “greener” products and using “greener” processes. The environmental performance of products and processes…
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Industrial Waste
Industrial wastes are the wastes produced by industrial activities which include materials that are rendered useless during manufacturing processes such as that of factories, industries, mills, and mining operations. This has existed since the start of the Industrial Revolution. Some examples of industrial wastes and sources are chemicals and allied products, solvents, pigments, sludge, metals,…
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Energy Sector
Oil, Coal, and Natural Gas Oil and natural gas infrastructure is vulnerable to the effects of climate change and the increased risk of disasters such as storm, cyclones, flooding, and long‐term increases in sea level. Minimizing these risks by building in less disaster prone areas can be expensive and impossible in countries with coastal locations…
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Key Vulnerabilities
Health Climate change poses a wide range of risks to population health – risks that will increase in future decades, often to critical levels, if global climate change continues on its current trajectory (McMichael et al. 2003). The three main categories of health risks include (i) direct‐acting effects (e.g. due to heat waves, amplified air pollution,…
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Are the Effects of Global Warming Really Concerns for Our Future?
Short answer: Yes. Even a seemingly slight average temperature rise is enough to cause a dramatic transformation of our planet. Eight degrees Fahrenheit – it may not sound like much, perhaps the difference between wearing a sweater and not wearing one on an early‐spring day. But for the world in which we live, which climate…
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Effects of Global Warming: Climate Change – The World’s Health
Roughly 40 years ago, a small group of scientists and policy makers began to realize that humanity was on a dramatic collision course, as the rapidly growing world economy and population threatened to collide with the planet’s finite resources and fragile ecosystems. The danger was first highlighted globally at the 1972 UN Conference on the Human…