Life Cycle Assessment of Printed Matter Using Rice-ink

Objective. The objective of this research is to analyze the environmental impact of printed matter using rice ink with the consideration of the impact of land use change and using reclaimed vegetable oil based on LCA method.Method. Several scenarios changing the raw materials (soy oil, recycled oil, rice bran) have prepared and evaluated environmental impacts of printed matter. 1000 print for A4 size paper was adopted as functional unit. System boundary in this study covered manufacturing raw materials, mixture, making ink, pulp production, printing and transportation. Recycling paper and disposal of used paper were excluded from the scope. Primary data was collected for the process of making ink in this study. Impact assessment was also applied as well as inventory analysis. Damage assessment and weighting were applied so that potential environmental impacts of several impact categories can be compared. LIME2 was adopted to carry out LCIA. Results and Discussion. A LCA of printed matter using soy ink and rice ink was carried out by using MiLCA software. With regard to the result of LCA for paper with ink, environmental impact of paper occupied the almost of total regardless of the types of ink. When we compared the environmental impacts between the inks, we found that environmental impact of rice ink was smaller than that of the other types of inks. Impact of land use for rice ink was smaller than the others, because allocated area for cultivating rice bran (co-product of polished rice) was estimated smaller. Furthermore, the use of reclaimed oil enables to decrease of land use impacts. On the other hand, environmental impact of soy ink is almost equal with that of conventional ink, because the land use area for cultivating soy beans are higher than that rice bran.Conclusions. Using reclaimed oil and co-products for raw material are key points for the reduction of environmental impacts of inks. We found that rice oil taking the both advantages make possible to reduce environmental impacts to ecosystem.