The National LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) Project is a mandate from the Government of Malaysia under the Ninth Malaysia Plan to develop the National Life Cycle Inventory Database. The Database will be used to conduct life cycle assessment studies, support the National Ecolabelling Programme and fulfil the requirements of foreign legislation that demand evidence on the control measures taken to reduce environmental impact of products and services throughout their life cycle.

STATUS OF CURRENT FUNDED PROJECTS

Back in September 2006, SIRIM submitted to the Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment the following:

Project on Material Flow Analysis of Major Raw Materials and Resources for Malaysia

The project budgeted at RM 42,450, is targeted to complete within 4 months from the start date (January).

The main objective of the project is to identify the raw materials flow in terms of amount and country of export of our major ores by means of statistic information search. At the same time this approach will lead to achieving some other objectives of data collection on the form of transportation, route and distance of raw material distribution. The final documentation on major raw material export data for the year 2006 has been complied in a spreadsheet format. The datasets of raw materials and resources compiled are of petroleum oil, iron ore, coal, limestone, copper ore, aluminium ore, tin ore, silver compounds, gold compounds iron products and aluminium products. The data format will be inputted later in the National LCA Database System.

Project on Survey of LCI Process Flows & Data Available in
Established Foreign Databases and Literature

The project cost to conduct the above survey is RM 53,400 over a six-month project implementation period. The aims are to garner LCI data offered commercially in particular by the foreign-based consulting organizations.

The project screens datasets available to meet the immediate target of the National LCA’s sectors of interest, amongst them are petroleum and natural gas production, petroleum refinery, petrochemicals production, electricity generation, etc. Through the procurement of an LCA software tool, SimaPro which readily contains commercial databases of EcoInvent, Buwal 250, etc., a series of datasets for certain unit processes are already being identified and available for adaptation and use as LCI data for initial LCA studies.

In line with the Ninth Malaysian Plan budget for facility development, under the WG for database system, SIRIM is now in the midst of evaluating tender proposals obtained from two (2) potential consultants to design the National Database System and as a start-up to incorporate the foreign-datasets adapted as the national inventory.

PROPOSALS FOR SHORT-TERM LCA PROJECTS

SIRIM is proudly taking the initiatives to come up with as many as possible short-term LCI studies (of 5-6 months duration) with the aim to support the national inventory data system development by providing the LCI datasets. The projects are proposed as sub-projects of the working groups.

The following listed short-term project proposals will be submitted for the Ministry’s approval.