Abstract
This paper reviews South African water sector life-cycle assessments (LCAs) and develops a position on how this tool could be strategically employed in the future. It summarises the studies undertaken, highlighting the significant findings and the lessons learnt. In addition, international trends and their implications for the local LCA community and the water sector are presented and strategic recommendations for the future are included. The various LCA studies undertaken in the local water industry have shown that the abstraction of water from the environment (in a country where it is a limited resource) and the use of energy for treating and pumping water and wastewater have the highest environmental burdens. These studies have also demonstrated the versatility of LCA as a decision-making tool in the water industry by comparing technologies and scenarios, identifying improvement opportunities and prioritising interventions and their consequences in complex water systems. Recent international work has confirmed the usefulness of a life-cycle approach also for water footprinting. Therefore, in South Africa it is important to promote the use of LCAs for the water sector in order to improve efficiency of processes and systems, but also to promote life-cycle based water footprinting and to include differentiated water consumption data into life-cycle inventories to make more efficient use of water as a resource.
Highlights
A life-cycle assessment (LCA) is a comprehensive environmental management tool used to investigate the environmental impacts of products, services and activities by taking a ‘cradleto-grave’ approach
An LCA quantifies inputs and outputs for all these stages and based on this it allows the calculation of environmental scores for defined impact categories (ISO, 2006a)
It represents another important methodological step in making LCAs more relevant to the South African context, because the regional normalisation factors used take into account the fact that water is a scarce resource in different regions in the country
Summary
A life-cycle assessment (LCA) is a comprehensive environmental management tool used to investigate the environmental impacts of products, services and activities by taking a ‘cradleto-grave’ approach. An LCA quantifies inputs and outputs for all these stages and based on this it allows the calculation of environmental scores for defined impact categories (such as global warming, ozone depletion, acidification, smog formation and toxicity to humans, terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems) (ISO, 2006a) These environmental scores are reported for a unit of functionality relevant to the system investigated (referred to as ‘the functional unit’). Water-related LCA studies have been applied at a strategic and/or regional level, at project and process level and at a very specific (e.g. the choice of different piping materials) level The majority of these studies emanated from developed countries which developed and shaped the methodology used.
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