Original Article | 2005, Vol.27, No.1, pp. 177-189
The PCA and IOA approaches for life-cycle analysis of greenhouse gas emissions from Thai commodities and energy consumption
Pawinee Suksuntornsiri and Bundit Limmeechokchai
pp. 177 - 189
Abstract
The use of more substitutable commodities, selected by their total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions would highly contribute to mitigating the effects of global warming. Life-cycle analysis (LCA) is a solution that can evaluate the total emissions from a lifetime production of a commodity. It is widely applied to reveal the actual environmental emissions in many countries, however this data could not be applied in other countries due to different emission and energy consumption structures. LCA emission factors within the same country are also different due to different assumptions on the boundary and lifetime of a considered production process. The process chains analysis (PCA), the conventional LCA approach which is mostly applied in Thailand, is accurate in the direct production process, but its analysis in the higher order production process is usually truncated due to a lack of data. It is laborious, time consuming, and hard to gather all the data from the whole production process. This article presents the pros and cons of PCA and inputoutput analysis (IOA) and introduces an appropriate approach in a Thai context. The adaptation of energyrelated GHG emissions findings in the revised 1996 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) guidelines for national GHG inventories are introduced for a commodity emission factor and traced through the whole production chains by IOA. In conclusion, the IOA gives emissions in average values and the historical economic structure is used to derive the emissions. However, emissions from every single link of production lifecycle can be taken into account. A combined PCA and IOA is recommended for an LCA of GHG emissions in Thailand.
