Document Type : Original Article
Authors
1
Department of Environmental Science, College of Natural Resources and the Environment, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran.
2
Department of Environmental management, College of Natural Resources and the Environment, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran.
3
Affiliation Department of Environment, Takestan Branch, Islamic Azad University, Takestan, Iran.
4
Department of Environmental science, College of Natural Resources and the Environment, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran.
5
Environmental Technologies Research Center, Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences, Ahvaz, Iran.
6
Environmental Health Engineering Department, School of Health, Ahvaz Jundishapur University of Medical Sciences, Ahvaz, Iran.
Abstract
Background: Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is a cradle-to-grave approach for assessment environmental impacts of a product's life cycle (LC). The present study examined the LC of 1 kilowatt-hour of electricity generation in one of the combined cycle power plants in southwestern Iran.
Methods: In this study LCA was performed based on the ISO14044 standard. ReCiPe method was applied from “gate-to-gate” to life-cycle impact assessment and were considered 10 impact categories at the midpoint level. The method was chosen because it models potential impacts per emission for several thousand chemicals and suggests a practical approach at two levels, midpoint and endpoint.
Results: According to the endpoint impact categories, damage to resource availability (RA) is 53% of the total impacts, damage to human health (HH) is 43% and damage to ecosystem diversity (ED) is 4%. RA, which includes natural land transformation (NLT) and fuel depletion (FD), is the most influential category. In the midpoint impact categories, more than 99% (5.58E-01 Kg/Kwh) of global warming potential and climate change (CC) is caused by CO2 emissions from fossil fuels combustion.
Conclusion: In conclusion, at midpoint level suggested NLT, FD, CC, freshwater ecotoxicity (FET), terrestrial ecotoxicity (TET), human toxicity (HT), photochemical oxidant formation (POF), terrestrial acidification (TA), freshwater eutrophication (FE), and water depletion (WD) as the most affected impact categories, respectively. However, the categories included damage to RA, HH, and ED in the endpoint level, respectively. Use of fossil fuels is one of the most important environmental effects during the LC of the studied power plant.
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