Tokyo City University Develops Japan's First Water Inventory Database

The Itsubo Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Laboratory at Tokyo City University developed a water inventory database and released it on their website on December 24, 2010. The database provides an index for calculating water footprint, which indicates the total volume of water used during feedstock and commodity production, disposal and recycling. By using this database of water usage and consumption, Itsubo LCA Laboratory aims at facilitating LCA implementation with a simpler calculation of water footprint.

This is nation's first attempt to develop database of physical output per unit of water, whereas Europe is advanced in this kind of database development due to inadequate availability of water resources. The newly developed database includes about 400 agricultural, textile, metal, and chemical applications based on economic input-output tables. It was created by researching the amount of water used during domestic production stages, with an indication of volume of water consumed per unit cost (yen; 1 yen=US$0.81) of the target goods. In addition, physical output per unit of water is categorized into river water, ground water, rainwater and recycled water in order to reflect impact on intake sources.

For appropriate and accurate assessment of a product's environmental burden, the laboratory is working on calculating carbon footprint and researching LCA, which evaluates the environmental effect of a product over its life cycle.

[Sustainability College] Issues of water as global resources
http://www.japanfs.org/en/pages/022678.html

Posted: 2011/04/21 06:00:15 AM