Development of new version of Inventory Database for Environmental Analysis (IDEA)= ISSF 2013 REFERENCE

Japanese Life Cycle Inventory Database development has been performed under the LCA project of five years from 1998 to 2003 with the support of METI. An LCA project’s database has about 300 data which were collected by industry association, and about 280 data which were collected from survey and literature. The inventory data of industrial association have high reliability as those data were gathered from actual factories of each industry and were calculated from industry average. So, we can use it as the background data which are common in Japan. However, many of these data were set gate to gate as a system boundary. Accordingly, it is necessary to confirm the data being connected to the upstream inventory data. If the data could not connect upstream inventory data, we would use reference data or background data of LCA software. In addition, the database was collected to target 14 substances (CO2, CH4, HFC, PFC, N2O, SF6, NOx, SOx, dust, BOD, COD, total phosphorus, total nitrogen, SS). Therefore, we are developing inventory database (IDEA) which is to advantage of the LCA project data to the fullest and to increase the environmental impact category. The total number of inventory data was over 3000 in developed database (IDEA ver.1). However, IDEA is still under development, so our database is mainly covered only Japanese industrial activity. It is necessary to collect inventory data of foreign countries and to consider with import products. And it is need to increase the environmental impact category more. And there are wide varieties of data quality of each inventory data. It is necessary to establish data quality evaluation method and to modify our data. In addition, it is important to update the database year by year.

In this presentation, we will discuss about to expand the environmental category of the water footprint data and land use data to IDEA and to update the database. In addition we will discuss about to collect inventory data of foreign countries and data exchanges.