Hitachi Develops Assessment Program to Compute Life Cycle Costs and CO2 Emissions

Hitachi Ltd., one of Japan's major electric appliance manufacturers, has developed a System Integration-Life Cycle Assessment program, or SI-LCA. The SI-LCA program enables assessments of the environmental impacts, specifically carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, and costs of the company's system-level service products throughout their entire life cycle, from design and development through usage and disposal.

Using software to calculate environmental impacts and costs, this program computes the amount of CO2 emissions and costs of Hitachi's relevant system-level service products at each life stage. The results of the before-and-after assessment are displayed as specific data tables and graphs. With this program, even at the proposal phase, Hitachi can provide its customers with information on how much they can reduce environmental impacts and costs by introducing its products.

Hitachi has already run a trial assessment on electronic application systems for administrative bodies and confirmed that the SI-LCA can quantify the environmental impacts produced by both service providers and users. This program was developed in cooperation with Professor Ryoichi Yamamoto of the University of Tokyo.



Posted: 2004/01/12 11:36:30 AM
Japanese version