Analysis of the human health damage and ecosystem quality impact of the palm oil plantation using the life cycle assessment approach

In recent years the palm oil has been criticized because of its impacts on the environment and human health. Therefore, this study focused on the investigation of human health and ecosystem quality impacts that arose from the plantation of fresh fruit bunch of palm oil by employing an open-source software, namely OpenLCA version 1.5. The life cycle assessment approach was used for the analysis of the investigated impacts. The effects of land use changes on the human health and ecosystem quality were assessed. By employing ReCiPe Endpoint methodology in life cycle impact assessment phase the total ecosystems impact 0.00017 species per year while total human health damage was 0.00146 DALY The results showed that the land use change has an impact on all the impacts categories except the freshwater eutrophication, freshwater ecotoxicity, ozone depletion, terrestrial ecotoxicity, and terrestrial acidification. In addition, the analysis showed that the application of the fertilizers and pesticides were the main contributor in all the impact categories. The results show that transportation is not the major contributor in any one of the impact categories