Evaluating eco-efficiency of appliances by integrated use of hybrid LCA and LCC tools

Abstract

Airconditioners are the appliance with the largest share of electricity consumption in Japanese households. In our preceding study, it was found that the high-end model (with the highest environmental performance with regard to Global Warming Potential and landfill consumption) turns out to be the one with the lowest life cycle cost, and the low-end model (with the lowest environmental performance) the one with the highest life cycle cost. This paper is concerned with investigating if the above finding still holds for more recent data, say for 2005, and also in analyzing possible changes that have occurred since 2002 from the perspective of eco-efficiency. Compared with the previous results, we notice a significant reduction in the cost at the use phase due to the convergence in efficiency at the use phase, and the resulting reduction in life-cycle costs among alternative models. There was thus a significant increase in eco-efficiency between 2002 and 2005 in terms of both CO₂ and landfill consumption.