Deliverable 4.2: Methodology for including specific biological effects and pathogen aspects into LCA

As described in deliverable 4.1 (Larsen et al. 2007) NEPTUNE is using two main types of life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) methodologies when doing LCA studies on the waste water treatment technologies included. The basic methodology is the well known existing EDIP97 methodology (Wenzel et al. 1997, Hauschild and Wenzel 1998) for which the impact assessment on toxicity is PNEC based.

However, in order to include the newest development on especially best available practice as regards ecotoxicity a new revised and updated EDIP 200X LCIA methodology has been developed. A first draft of this methodology is presented here. Furthermore, special issues related to waste water have been addressed by including novel development on LCIA methodology for possible impact from pathogens and whole effluent toxicity.

Special focus is also allocated to micropollutants with specific toxic mode of action (i.e. endocrine disruptors) and the possibilities and relevance of including impact categories on land use and site-specific assessments have been addressed. Further, the special problems on how to deal with land fill and how to do normalization and weighting of impact potentials are also dealt with.

The problem with possible bias in normalization references is especially addressed.