This method is developed and applied by the JEPIX Forum, a voluntary initiative of several organizations and private persons from Environmental Accounting, Environmental Management, Eco-Rating and Life Cycle Impact Assessment in Japan.
Inspired by the Swiss EcoScarcity method, JEPIX is based on the distance-to-target principle, but in many respects takes different approaches to derive Ecofactors for the weighting of interventions. The method puts more emphasis on a transparent, simple and understandable, but trend-consistent description of the political situations rather than on the preciseness of natural science based modelling. It is designed to indicate, where political pressure is high and therefore new legal requirements are likely to occur and hence to rise environmental costs for industry. Therefore it is considered as complementary to existing LCIA methods, that indicate damage to environment and/or society.
A first version of JEPIX was published in 2003 as a draft focusing on emissions and addressing 11 focal subjects of Japanese environmental legislation. It provides weighting factors for some 1050 interventions. For substance bound legislation, the weighting is based on annual flows (actual and target), whereas for effect oriented legislation midpoint models such as GWP, ODP, Human Toxicity or POCP are used to derive national flows. As the environmental situation varies substantially across Japan, the weighting factors for some 150 substances are scaled to reflect the situation in each of the 47 prefectures as well as for some 100 rivers, 15 lakes and 3 inland sea areas/bays.
The draft version was published in 2003 with support of the Japan Environmental Ministry (MoE), the Ministry for Economy Trade and Industry (METI) and the Ministry for Education and Technology (MEXT).
Since 2003 some 40 leading Japanese Companies (including Komatsu, Canon, TEPCO, Suntory, Fuji Film, All Nippon Airways, J-Power, etc.) are applying this method to evaluate and communicate their environmental performance data and to conduct LCA of products and services. Under the Centre of Excellence Program of the Japanese government, the method will be enhanced based on their experience. The final version of JEPIX is expected for publication in 2006. An integration of resources as well as the adoption of newly available data on chemicals is already under development.
Key Contact: Claude Siegenthaler - email: claude@i.hosei.ac.jp