Abstract
Human exposure to indoor pollutant concentrations is receiving increasing interest in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). We address this issue by incorporating an indoor compartment into the USEtox model, as well as by providing recommended parameter values for households in four different regions of the world differing geographically, economically, and socially. With these parameter values, intake fractions and comparative toxicity potentials for indoor emissions of dwellings for different air tightness levels were calculated. The resulting intake fractions for indoor exposure vary by 2 orders of magnitude, due to the variability of ventilation rate, building occupation, and volume. To compare health impacts as a result of indoor exposure with those from outdoor exposure, the indoor exposure characterization factors determined with the modified USEtox model were applied in a case study on cooking in non-OECD countries. This study demonstrates the appropriateness and significance of integrating indoor environments into LCA, which ensures a more holistic account of all exposure environments and allows for a better accountability of health impacts. The model, intake fractions, and characterization factors are made available for use in standard LCA studies via www.usetox.org and in standard LCA software.
Highlights
Life cycle Assessment (LCA) has broad applications in supply chain management and policy analysis, helps to identify effective improvement strategies for the environmental performance of products or services and to avoid burden shifting between different environmental issues.[1]
The aims of this paper are 1) extending the USEtox model[13] to include the indoor environment as a compartment; 2) providing an overview of recommended parameter values to be used as default household model parameters for different geographical settings; 3) comparing intake fractions calculated with these recommended default parameters with intake fractions for outdoor exposure; and, 4) applying the new characterization factors for indoor exposure to a comprehensive case study on cooking worldwide
Overall framework: In the USEtox framework based on Rosenbaum et al.[16], the characterization factor matrix that represents the impact per kg substance emitted is obtained by multiplying an intake fraction matrix by an effect factor matrix (EF)
Summary
Life cycle Assessment (LCA) has broad applications in supply chain management and policy analysis, helps to identify effective improvement strategies for the environmental performance of products or services and to avoid burden shifting between different environmental issues.[1] Current LCA methodology covers more than a dozen impact categories such as climate change, acidification, eutrophication, land-use, or water-use, as well as toxicity, distinguishing ecotoxicity and human toxicity The latter currently only considers outdoor exposure to ubiquitous chemical concentrations in the environment (or food) from emissions of a product’s or service’s life cycle, while indoor exposure with proximity to sources emitting in confined (dilution) volumes have not yet been integrated. Human exposure to indoor concentrations of chemicals is receiving increasing interest in LCA.[2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11]
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