Research and development of the object-oriented life cycle assessment database

Taking the life cycle assessment (LCA) database being developed by the authors as an example, this paper discusses the main problems in the development of LCA databases and the ways to overcome these problems. The application of the object-oriented technique for the development of a LCA database is also discussed. A LCA database should contain two parts: one is the database of material properties; the other is the database of environmental impacts. The discussion in this paper is mainly focused on the database of the environmental impacts of materials. The database of environmental impacts consists of waste emissions caused in mining, extraction, manufacturing, use and recycling processes of materials. The database also contains a system to analyze the relationship between the environmental impacts and the processing technologies of the materials. The database is developed under Windows 98 and uses VISUAL BASIC 5.0 as the main tool. The application of the object-oriented program design technique can reduce the difficulty of database design and ensure a reasonable database structure. It can also reduce the complexity in data processing. In the last part of the paper, part-implementation of life cycle assessments for some polymers and metallic materials are shown.