Acidification: Is a relevant impact category in western arid region of Argetnina?

CIVIT, B AND ARENA, AP

Egmod aan Zee, Holanda

Conferencia; 2 International Conference on Ecoefficiency; 2006

Leiden University, The Netherlands

The methodological achievements of the Life Cycle Assessment registered inthe last years, in particular referred to the Environmental ImpactAssessment step, have been aimed mainly at the development and use ofmethods that consider the site conditions where the emissions take placeand the receiving ecosystems, to quantify the impact they produce. Thisway, instead of calculating potential impacts, real ones are determined.Despite the obvious advantages associated with this type of methodologies,new difficulties and uncertainties must be solved, mainly when applyingthem in very different contexts from those where they have been developed.Based on the results obtained when calculating the site - dependentacidification factors for the western arid region of Argentina, this workevaluates if Acidification is an impact category of relevance whenassessing the impact produced during the life cycle of a product, processor activity carried out in that region. The results suggest thatconsidering the environmental conditions and emission patterns of theregion, soil acidification is not a relevant impact. On the other hand,they show the need of considering impact categories that reflect localenvironmental issues of concern such as desertification, usage of water,land occupation and salinity of soils.