The Background of the National LCI Database Development and Compilation

The Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) of products or services is an important basic information to support the country’s environmental and commercial work, such as the life-cycle environmental impact assessment, the development of environmentally friendly products, the planning of resource utilization and the making of governmental policy. Realizing these importance, an alliance of 5 institutions, namely, the National Metal and Materials Technology Center (MTEC) – the National Science and Technology Development Agency (NSTDA), the Ministry of Industry (Department of Industrial Works: DIW), the Federation of Thai Industries (FTI), Thailand Environment Institute (TEI), and the Thailand Research Fund (TRF) had established “Thai National Life Cycle Inventory Database” as Thailand’s infrastructure data for supporting environmental and trade issues. The life cycle inventory analysis of a product or a service, by using the LCA method, that affects reliable and transparent of the result. The assessment can be properly used for production improvement, supply chain selection, resource and policy planning, decision making, and environmental labels application, such as Carbon Footprint (CF).

The implementation of the Thai National Life Cycle Inventory Database

The aforementioned alliance had created Thailand’s basic materials and energy Life Cycle Database that focuses on three main materials and energy groups, as follows:

The Infrastructure Group, such as products from oil refineries, gas separation plant, electricity, water supply (tap water and industrial water), and truck transportation.
The Basic Materials Group, which consists of subgroups, namely
2.1 The industrial materials, such as textiles, pulp and paper, and plastic pellets.
2.2 The agricultural materials, such as natural rubber, palm oil, vegetables, fruits, and livestock.
2.3 The construction materials, such as glass and rubber wood.

The Recycle and Waste Management Group, such as recycling, incineration, landfill, and anaerobic digestion.

The working groups related to the Thai National Life Cycle Inventory Database

The Commissioner that maintains a central database is the currently the Technology and Informatics Institute for Sustainability (TIIS). TIIS is responsible for supervising the quality, maintenance, dissemination, and compilation, as well as the overall development of the database to meet international standards.
The Practitioner or a data collector, namely the group of individuals or agencies with the expertise in target industries, is responsible for dealing with the industrial sectors or relevant agricultural sectors to request for information, verifying the accuracy, and delivering those information to the central database.
The Steering Committee is responsible for supervising the development of a life cycle database to achieve the operational objectives, tracking on the work progress, and supporting the implementation of the project.
The Technical Committee is responsible for supervising the overall picture of the technical operations, establishing the tracking progress method, as well as giving advices or solutions.

In the establishment of the National LCI of a particular product, the data collector or the practitioner is required to understand the target products and the LCA principles. Once the practitioner has set the target and scope of the data collection, a questionnaire will be created for interviewing with the entrepreneurs to obtain the required information. The information received will be converted to compute the average LCI, which is the country’s representative, and then this value will be returned to the TIIS. It is advised that, the practitioner set up a committee that consists of the experts in the LCA and relevant fields of the target products to provide advice on the questionnaires’ scope and comment on the LCI results. If the committee requires any improvement of the data, the practitioner should take corrective actions. Lastly, to ensure that the National LCI is complied with the ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 standards, the practitioner should provide the correct data collection methods with high-quality and transparent information that meet the objectives.

Further information, please contact:

Jitti Mungkalasiri
Senior Researcher
02 564 6500 ext. 4063
jitti.mungkalasiri@nstda.or.th