Yasuhiko Wada, Hiroyuki Miura and Kazuko Nakano

* Department of Civil Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Kansai University
(3-3-35, Yamate-cho, Suita 564 Japan)

Abstract

In recent years, the necessity of recycling has been widely recognized. However, a social system for recycling has not been provided completely, as of yet and there is some fear that environmental impacts will increase as a result of recycling. From now on, in order to reduce environmental impacts with recycling in order to promote recycling, we have to scientifically and objectively show that we can reduce the environmental impacts with recycling. We must also make clear what will to reduce environmental impacts with recycling if we can not reduce the environmental impacts with present recycling system. In this paper, we examined the analytic method for the calculate the environmental impacts of the recycling phase using LCA method. With this method as we proposed, we showed that recycling influences a decrease in environmental impacts, and we reveal the specific process in the recycling system that increases environmental impacts.

Key words: recycling, life cycle assessment, environmental load, social system, recycling phase