Timo Jouttijärvi

Forest industry and the environment: a life cycle assessment study from Finland

Abstract Management of forest resources and related industries has a significant effect on the Finnish environment. Therefore there was an obvious need for a study to assess environmental impacts and to identify needs and options for environmental improvements in the forest sector. It was against this background that the Finnish Environment Institute carried out a life cycle assessment (LCA) of the Finnish forest industry. This application included methodological innovations compared with the traditional product-related LCA because it was a study of the whole production system of the mechanical and chemical forest industry. Areas for improvement of environmental protection in the forest sector for the year 2005 were identified on the basis of the inventory (emissions, wastes, etc.), environmental impact assessment and other available data. During the study a new impact assessment procedure was developed in order to assess more actual impacts of country-specific systems. Although the prioritized factors found were not strongly ranked against each other it can be concluded that maintaining biodiversity in the context of forestry practices and increasing the efficiency of energy use are the key issues in the environmental protection of the forest sector. Before detailed ranking of emissions and other stressors can be produced there is a need for more reliable stressor data, better understanding of stressor–effect relationships and more consensus on the importance of different environmental problems. Despite the limitations and needs for further development, the presented LCA approach can be regarded as a useful tool for providing a deeper understanding of the key issues in the environmental protection of a whole production system.

Life cycle inventory analyses for five waste management options for discarded newspaper

This paper presents the results of life cycle inventory (LCI) analyses that were carried out to determine the environmental impacts (emissions, resource extractions and land use) of different newspaper waste management options for the Helsinki Metropolitan Area (HMA). LCI analyses were performed for five product systems, in which discarded newspapers were divided into two streams: separately collected newspapers and newspapers in mixed waste. In all the options, the manufacturing and printing processes of newspaper were kept unchanged. The waste management alternatives included combinations of material recycling, energy recovery and landfilling. These product systems were modelled using the current collection rate of newspaper and four additional collection rates. The LCIs of the product systems showed that the life cycle phase causing the most environmental impacts was the paper mill. When comparing the different waste management systems, the energy recovery options were in general superior to landfilling. The ecological implications of the increased energy recovery and decreased material recycling of newspaper were, however, not yet considered in the study. These aspects were assessed in the life cycle impact assessment (LCIA), which was performed after the LCI phase.