Uncovering the

© 2012 Sharaai et al., licensee InTech. This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Uncovering the Relation Between Environmental Damage and the Rate of Rainfall Received Through a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) Study on Potable Water Production in Malaysia


INTRODUCTION
Global climate change is a threat that people are not aware or are not given enough attention to.In Malaysia, there are people who take this problem very lightly.Global climate change is usually linked to the increase in the world temperature that involves; complex processes and would take a long time to take effect.However, the impact from global climate change is getting more apparent and can be felt by people of the world resulted from the increase in world temperature.The increase in world temperature or better known as global warming is a new threat to people's and the nation's safety and could be even worse than weapon of destruction.It is due to the fact that global warming does not discriminate against skin color and boundaries of a nation.In Malaysia, signs of climate changes due to global warming can be seen through various disasters and symptoms affecting several areas throughout the country such as increasing sea level, haze, flood and water shortage.Climate change does not only involves Malaysia but is a global problem that must be dealt with cooperatively by every nations in the world.

What is Global Climate Change?
Global climate change is usually associated with the increase of world temperature or better known as global warming.Global warming is an indication or a symptom that there is an increase in surface temperature both on land, in the ocean or the combination of both in vast scale.Global warming is caused by burning of fossil fuel such as coal, oil and gas resulting in the increase of green house gases such as carbon dioxide, methane and chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) in the atmosphere.The accumulated green house gases trapped in the atmosphere causes the earth to become warmer.
The real cause and factor contributing to the climate change and global warming is still being debated by various parties.But the fact is, evidence shows that climate change and global warming is caused by human activities and lifestyle.Development, deforestation, industries, factories and transportation are among the activities that contribute to worldwide climate change.Global climate change occurs as an effect from the increase of green house gas in the atmosphere generated by the rapid development in production industries, timber processing, agriculture, transportation and other industries in the world that is tipping the balance with nature.This inadvertently contributes to the increase of these gases, indirectly increasing the earth's temperature.
Increased carbon dioxide gas in the atmosphere is generated from the burning of fossil fuel such as petrol, coal and natural gas.According to the 4th Assessment Report (2007 Climate Change) Inter-Governmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC), 98% of the temperature increase on earth is caused by the release of carbon dioxide gas.Carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere increases from 280ppm recorded in the 18th century (prior to the industrial revolution era) to 379 ppm in 2005.In 2099, if human maintain current momentum of fossil fuel use as it is right now, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is predicted to increase by 700ppm.This situation would render the environment of the earth no longer suitable for human inhabitation.Relatively, green house gas emission by Malaysia is still small compared to other countries in this world(see Table 1).Nevertheless, a control system is needed to reduce the emission of green house gas into the atmosphere.The Impact of World Climate Change to the Country: Climate change is believed to have speed up the weather process causing sudden changes within a period of time.It is threatening human and nation's safety from the physical and psychological aspects.The combination of both would create crisis to peoples' lives, public safety/order, political stability and economic integrity if not managed properly.Among the physical effects of climate change to the country are as follows:

Natural Disaster:
The change of monsoon wind direction, rising sea level, irregular rainfall are among the result of climate change.The increasing earth temperature will create a huge threat to human life resulted from increased frequency of natural disaster occurrence over time.Typhoon, floods, draught and plague of diseases related to the environment are among the natural disasters that would follow the unpredictable climate change.W ith 9% of land area in Malaysia (29,000 sq.km) exposed to flooding, 2.7 million people in this country might be the victims.The ever-changing weather causes the country to face possibility of natural disaster situation.As an example, in 2006 and 2007, the state of Johor experiences the worst flooding affecting 109, 831 victims to be evacuated (Bakar et al., 2007).Other states experiencing similar situation during that time were Melaka, Pahang, Kelantan and Negeri Sembilan.A total of 344 flood evacuation centre was set up.It was reported that 17 lives were lost in this extreme flooding disaster (BBC News, 2007).The flood was linked to Hurricane Utor (The Star, 2006).In October 2008, flash flood happened in northern state of peninsular Malaysia like Kedah and Perak due to the hotter sea surface in the region (Bernama, 2008).

Water Source:
Rapid development in urbanization process and industries increases the demand for water especially in the sectors of industrial, agricultural and also domestic use.Climate change can cause two possibility of occurrence; Malaysia experiencing increase or decrease of rainfall.Increase rainfall would mean that Malaysia would be exposed to flooding causing destruction to infrastructure, properties and lost of life.Meanwhile, a decrease in rainfall would cause reduction in clean water source for domestic use, agricultural and industrial.During the 1977 -78 periods drought devastated paddy production in most of the irrigation schemes in Northwest Peninsular Malaysia (Azizan and Sootyanarayana, 2008).In 1982 and 1991, droughts were responsible for the critical drop of water levels in in the state of Kedah, resulting in cancellation of the offseason crop production (Azizan and Sootyanarayana, 2008).In 1991, the state of Melaka faced critical water problems with water levels falling below critical levels, thereby forcing severe water rationing for months in the state (Climate Ark, 2002).In 1998, the El Nino related drought caused severe water stress in the states of Kedah, Penang and Selangor.The state of Selangor was forced to impose severe water rationing in Kuala Lumpur and Petaling Jaya for many months (Angela, 2002).According to the Seventh Malaysia Plan reports, several countries experience water shortages after the year 2000, including Kedah, Pulau Pinang, Selangor (Rahman, 2007).

World Climate Change and the Need for Sustainable Development:
Development can increase the quality of human life.This can be felt from the increasing quality of products, services, health, social and culture.Development is endless and will keep expanding to fulfill the changing human vision and mission.But development process usually has a negative effects to the environment, thus demanding a more environmentally sound development.Unplanned and unsustainable development has placed great pressure in every dimension of the environment (air, water, soil, health, etc.) that ultimately causes problem that not only involves local but global such as global warming.Sustainable development is the need of the hour; it can only be achieved through effective environmental management (Khan et al., 2002).Effective environmental management can be achieved through the various environmental assessment tools including life cycle assessment (LCA).

Methodology of LCA:
There are four main phases in LCA as suggested in ISO 14040 series: Goal and scope definition (ISO 14040) Life cycle inventory (LCI) (ISO 14041) Life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) (ISO 14042) Life cycle assessment and interpretation (LCAI) (ISO 14043)

Goal and Scope Definition:
In goal definition and scoping, the use of the results is identified, the scope of the study is stated, the functional unit is defined, and a strategy and procedures for data collection and data quality assurance are established.

Objectives:
The goal of this study is to see the extent of environmental impact from the water treatment process which uses chemicals and electricity in varying quantum due to the varying quality and quantity of the water source resulted from two extreme weather conditions; wet and dry seasons.Apart from that, this study also tries to identify the weaknesses that exists in the drinking water treatment process life cycle as we follows all the material and energy flows of the product system from the natural environment back to the natural environment over the product's whole life.

Functional unit:
Functional unit is quantified performance of a product system for use as a reference unit in a life cycle assessment study (ISO, 2000).A constant value must be created to make the comparison (Miettinen and Hamalainen, 1997).Functional unit for this study is the production of 1m of treated water a day that fits the

Description of the System under Study:
To define the system boundaries for a product, it is essential to understand how a product is manufactured.In producing treated water, raw water goes through several phases before drinking water that fits the set standard is produced.Raw water extracted from rivers will go through the following process in the water treatment plant:

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Screening, to remove floating big sized rubbish on the surface of the water.

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Coagulation and flocculation, coagulation process is a process of forming particles called floc.Coagulant need to be added to form floc.The coagulants that are normally use includes Aluminium sulphate, Ferric sulphate and Ferric chloride.Tiny flocs will in turn attract each other while at the same time pulling the dissolved organic material and particulate to combine, forming a big flocculant particle.This process is called flocculation.
• Sedimentation, Floc produced will settle on the base of the sedimentation basin.The accumulation of floc settlement is called sludge.• Filtration, part of the floc which does not settle in the sedimentation basin will go through filtration.W ater passing through filtration consisting of sand layers and activated carbon or anthracite coal.• Disinfection process is needed to eliminate pathogen passing through the filters.Among the chemicals used for the disinfection are chlorine, chloramines, chlorine dioxide, ozone, and UV radiation.

Life Cycle Inventory (LCI):
After scoping the product system, the inventory in the system under study is gathered.It includes information on the input and output (environmental exchanges) for all the process within the boundaries of the product system (see fig. 1).The result of an inventory is a long list of material and energy requirements, products and co-products as well as wastes.T his list is referred to as the material and energy balance, the inventory table, or the eco-balance of the product (Guinee, 2002).This LCA study is a streamlined LCA where background data for electricity, chemicals and transport using database contained in the Jemaipro and Simapro 7 software.Foreground data collected from the treatment plant are:

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Electricity usage, and • Chemicals such as Aluminium sulphate (alum), Polyaluminium chloride (PAC), Chlorine, and Calcium hydroxide (lime) Foreground data mentioned above was compiled from selected treatment plant.The treatment plant provides data for three different weather conditions:

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Data for normal day.Chemical and electricity usage data for rivers that does not experience any increase nor decrease in water level.The river water is identified as river category of Class II.The average chemical and electricity consumption is used to represent daily data.

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Data for rainy season.Records for sudden increase in water level in the river is identified.The average chemical and electricity consumption is used to represent data of days that experience sudden increase in water level in the river.

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Data for dry season.Records of water suddenly dipping below minimum level is obtained.The average chemical and electricity consumption is used to represent daily data of days that experience sudden decrease in water level in the river.

Life Cycle Impact Assessment (LCIA):
The purpose of the life cycle impact assessment is to interpret the inventory results into their potential impacts on the areas of protection of the LCA (Hauschild and W hy, 2007).i.e in Eco-indicator 99 (see table 3), the entities that the use of the LCA shall help protect: Areas of protection for LCIA:

Classification and Characterization:
Classification is the step in which the data from the inventory analysis (the substance emissions) are grouped together into a number of impact categories (Bovea and Gallardo, 2003).Grouping to impact categories is according to their ability to contribute to different environmental problems.W hile characterization are the effect of each item on each impact category is quantified.A typical way is to use equivalency factors, in some instances also called potentials.For example, global warming potential for a substance indicates its 2 relative potential to increase the global warming effect compared to CO , whose GW P is set to one.In ISO 14040 series classification and characterization are two basic mandatory elements.Below is the result of the analysis done in this study (see Fig 2).

Fig. 2: Characterization According to 3 Protection Areas
Analysis is focused on three damage categories namely damage to human health, damage to ecosystem quality and damage to resource depletion.Analysis found that during rainy season, the situation has the potential to cause higher damage to human health (0.0407 DALY) and ecosystem quality (1.92E3 PDF*m2yr) at about 46% each compared to dry season and normal day.However, during the dry season, eventhough the value is much lower than rainy season, it is still higher than normal day but the difference is not too big (difference in value of 0.0014 DALY in Human Health damage and 0.07E3 PDF*m2yr in Ecosystem Quality damage).In damage to resources, rainy season is still higher compared to dry season and normal day.But the contribution does not exceed 40%.Meanwhile, dry season still contributes higher compared to normal day.Values for rainy season, dry season and normal day is 578, 536 and 521 MJ surplus respectively.Analysis shows that two main substances contribute to these three damage categories.The substances are polyaluminium chloride (PAC) and natural gas.The PAC chemical production process releases sulphur oxides and nitrogen oxides that contributes to Human Health and Ecosystem Quality damages, while electricity generation contributes to natural resources depletion damage.From impact analysis (refer Table 4), rainy season succeeded other categories in all impact categories (carcinogens, respiratory organics, respiratory inorganics, climate change, and ozone layer) in human health damage except for radiation impact category.For radiation impact category, rainy season falls to second place followed by normal day.In the rest of the categories included in the damage to environmental quality category and natural resources depletion, highest impact is contributed most by rainy season (ecotoxicity, acidification/eutrophication, land use, minerals, and fossil fuels.

Normalization:
Normalization expresses the magnitude of the impact scores on a scale which is common to all the categories of impact.Impact scores and resource consumptions from characterization are related to a common reference in order to facilitate comparisons across impact categories (Huijbregts et al., 2003).The impact scores are usually expressed in person equivalents, PE.The PE represents the annual impact from an average person and is useful for bringing the rather diverse environmental impacts on a common scale.Normalization is an optional element in ISO 14040 series.The following are the result of the normalization analysis for the impact category obtained (refer Table 4).Normalization shows the damage to human health quality as the main item.Impact to respiratory inorganic is pointed out as the main cause.The value for this impact category in rainy season, dry season and normal day is 2.65, 1.51 and 6.6E-06 DALY respectively.Meanwhile in damage to ecosystem category acidification/eutrophication is valued at 0.37, 0.21 and 0.20 for rainy season, dry season and normal day respectively.However, damage to ecosystem quality is in second place after damage to human health.Resource category is last in ranking as the impact contribution is the lowest among all the impact categories.For this damage, the fossil fuels impact category is higher compared to minerals.The contribution value for rainy season, dry season and normal day is 0.07, 0.063 and 0.062.Rainy day remains the highest contributor for this impact category.

Weighting:
W eighting is also known as valuation.Weighting is the last step in LCIA where a ranking is performed of the different environmental impact categories and resources consumptions reflecting the relative importance they are assigned in the study (Soares et al., 2006;Pennington et al., 2004).The aim of this step is to arrive at a further interpretation and aggregation of the data of the impact assessment.The importance of the impact categories in relation to each other is a value-bound procedure based on an assessment of the relative environmental harm.This assessment will therefore reflect social values and preferences (Consoli et al., 1993).W eighting is another optional element.

Life Cycle Assessment Interpretation (LCAI):
Interpretation is the phase of the LCA where the results of the other phase are interpreted according to the goal of the study using sensitivity and uncertainty analysis.The outcome of the interpretation may be a conclusion serving as a recommendation to the decision makers, who will normally consider the environmental and resource impacts together with other decision criteria (such as economic and social aspects) (Hauschild et al., 2005).

Im provement Assessm ent:
From the Analysis Conducted, There Are Two W eaknesses Identified: 1. Production of PAC: Contributed to damage to human health quality and damage to ecosystem quality.The process in producing this chemical releases two other dangerous chemicals; nitrogen oxides and sulphur oxides.2. Depletion of fossil fuel namely natural gas: Natural gas is used in electricity generation.These weaknesses could be overcome using more environmental friendly alternatives such as: • Replacing PAC with Alum.PAC is a coagulant that could be replaced with other chemical substance such as Alum.In this case, the water treatment plant uses both coagulants in similar quantities.Thus the suggestion is for the complete PAC replacement with Alum to depict the impact of the replacement.• Natural resource depletion; natural gas: The existing advantages that water treatment plants have must be given attention should complete dependence in natural gas as fuels of electricity generation are to be avoided.The main advantage is the constant flow of water in water treatment plant that could be used to generate electric.Other than that, the location of the water treatment plant that is usually exposed to solar radiation is also an advantage that should not be taken lightly.The use of solar panels could assist in getting alternative electricity source from this existing advantage.Thus a suggestion made to reduce the damage to natural resources depletion is the use of hybrid electric generation combining three type of electric generation namely solar panels (25%), hydro electric (25%) and natural gas (50%).This situation tries to get the effects in the reduction of the main substance used in electricity generation; natural gas.Background data for solar panels and hydro electric in Simapro 7 software is used to compare the actual result (natural gas usage) with the suggested corrective measure using the combination electricity generation process.
The result of the weighting analysis for corrective suggestions is shown in fig. 4. From the analysis conducted, both damage to human health and ecosystem quality can be reduced to more than 90%.For example, in the damage to human health category, the original value for rainy season (795 Pt), dry season (455 Pt) and normal day (428 Pt) can be reduced to 2.65 Pt only.This is the same with damage to ecosystem quality, the original value for rainy season (150 Pt), dry season (85.4 Pt) and normal day (80.4Pt) can be reduced to a mere 0.48 Pt only.However, the used of hybrid technology in electricity generation can reduce 50% of damage to resources.The analysis also found that the use of hybrid technology does not gives impact to damage to human health and ecosystem quality.

Conclusion:
The goal of this study is to analyse the damages that would happen from the use of chemical use dan electricity generation from two extreme climate condition in this country; rainy season and dry season.Both this climate conditions is also linked to the world climate change which; a hot current topic nowadays.Based on the analysis of environment impact using ecoindicator 99 evalution method, it is found that rainy season and dry season contributes higher to environmental damage namely damage to human health, damage to ecosystem quality and damage to resources if compared to normal days.The rainy season is found to contribute much higher impact compared to dry season and normal day.The dry season still contributes impact to the environmental but with insignificant difference than normal days.The consumption of Alum, PAC and Chlorine would increase during the rainy season.This situation is used to ensure that treated water fits the standard set.The increase in these chemicals has the potential to cause environmental damage.The chemical that was identified to contribute to these damages are PAC.The production of this chemical releases two hazardous by product chemicals namely nitrogen oxides and sulphur oxides.Nevertheless, both damages could be reduced by completely replacing the coagulant with a more environmentally friendly coagulant such as Alum.After the replacement of the chemical, the burden on ecosystem quality and human health could be reduced up to 80% -90%.
Damage to the natural resources depletion is caused by electricity generation using natural gas.Advantages at the water treatment plan could be fully utilized to avoid dependence on natural gas.This includes the running water in the water treatment system and water treatment plant location that is exposed to solar radiation could be harness to generate electric.Hybrid electric could reduce the complete dependence on fossil fuel natural gas in water treatment plant.
Even though the replacement of PAC with the more ecosystems friendly Alum could reduce the damage to ecosystem quality and human health quality, but the disadvantage of Alum use is that it generates a high quantity of sludge.Though there are claims that sludge produced from water treatment plant is not dangerous

Fig 1 :
Fig 1: System boundaries and process under study

Fig. 3 :
Fig. 3: Weighting in Damage Assessment for 3 Different Situation W eighting analysis shows a result similar to normalization analysis where the first ranking remain with damage to human health followed by damage to ecosystem quality and damage to resources (refer Fig 3).Values for Damage to Human Health are 795, 455 and 428 Pt for rainy season, dry season and normal day.Damage to Ecosystem Quality is at second place with a difference between 340 Pt (Rainy season), 369.4Pt (Dry season) and 408 Pt (normal day) compared to damage to human health category.Damage to resources category is in the last place indicating that this category is seen as contributing the least impact compared to damage to human health and ecosystem quality.Values for the three situations are 20.6 Pt (Rainy season), 19.1 Pt (Dry season) and 18.6 Pt (Normal Day).

Fig. 4 :
Fig. 4: W eighting analysis with corrective measure to overcome damage to human health, damage to ecosystem quality and damage to resources

Table 2 :
Damage Assessm ent and Im pact According to Eco-Indicator 99Evaluation M ethod (Goedkoop and Spriensm a, 2001)

Table 3 :
Characterization to Im pact Category for Different Situation

Table 4 :
Norm alisation to Im pact Category for Different Situation