Life cycle assessment on metal supply from environmental perspective

Abstract

Metal supply is very important for economic development and the environmental effect on metal supply has become a serious problem. The main challenge is to decide how to quantify the environmental effect. A series of researches have promoted different methods. This paper promotes an improved approach for assessment of environmental effect on metal supply. LCA method was used and system steps of the mining and processing during LCA method of a specific metal was first identified. The midpoint and endpoint data were derived separately for Al and Cu as case study. Then normalization was applied to the endpoint data and the section with biggest value was considered most serious environmental effect. And the endpoint value for this section is chosen as environmental implication for a specific metal. We hope this approach can be a convenient and practical method for the environmental effect assessment.