Implementation of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for oil palm industry in Aceh Province, Indonesia

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a holistic environmental accounting procedure which quantifies and evaluates all wastes discharged to the environmental and raw materials consumed throughout the entire life cycle, beginning with sourcing raw materials from the earth through manufacturing and distribution to consumer use and disposal. Currently, environmental consideration becomes the most important issue in application oil palm industry in Indonesia. Scientific approach through LCA can be used as a tool to assess this issue. LCA can be used to ensure that all environmental impacts has been considered for deciding action, calculating environmental impact that might occur, comparing process performance and developing data base for further research. In this regard, LCA can be used as a tool to support decision making on environmental improvement conducted by enterprise or government. Other advantage taken from LCA is that it can be used for in comparing and evaluating products which have similar functions or uses. The target of LCA is to compare the whole environmental damage caused by product or particular activity and then select one option which have the least damage risk. In Indonesian case, the data access that can be used in this LCA study is very limited. Number of LCA study on Indonesian biodiesel production come up with different result. This difference could be due to data inconsistency and did not present the actual condition found in the field. According to those aforementioned situations, an effort to address this issue should be conducted by identifying and presenting actual condition of Indonesian palm oil estate. In this research, LCA will be used to analyze the prospect of oil palm industry in Aceh province Indonesia based on sustainability and environmental impact. This study is aimed to analyze implementation of life cycle assessment for oil palm industry (upstream to downstream) in Aceh Province Indonesia.