Establishing a Framework for Airport Life Cycle Inventory Development: The Case of Schiphol Airport
M.P. de Ruijter (TU Delft - Technology, Policy and Management)
Nils Thonemann – Mentor (Universiteit Leiden)
P.C. Roling – Graduation committee member (TU Delft - Operations & Environment)
More Info
expand_more
Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.
Abstract
The aviation industry is a significant contributor to environmental degradation, responsible for approximately 2% of global CO2 emissions. While considerable research has examined the environmental impacts of flights, relatively little attention has been paid to airports, which are critical infrastructure for the aviation industry. Existing Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) of airports are limited due to incomplete inventory data, since the inventory excludes many essential processes required for airport operations. This thesis addresses this gap by developing a framework to support the systematic collection of comprehensive inventory data of airports, enabling more robust LCA studies to be conducted. The framework was developed by compiling data requirements from multiple scientific sources, that all focused on specific intermediate or environmental flows such as energy use, material inputs and emissions from an airport. The thesis also demonstrates how inventory for airports can be collected using the developed framework. Inventory data was collected for Schiphol Airport using secondary data sources such as scientific papers and sustainable reports of the airport. The results highlight that the construction of the airport demanded a lot of concrete, while the use of APUs and aircraft taxiing are the major contributors of the airports GHG emissions. Though the results only focus on the development of the framework and the collection of inventory data from Schiphol Airport, it can be hypothesised that the high demand for concrete and the associated emissions contribute the largest to the environmental impact of the airport. Nevertheless, the findings demonstrate that the framework can be used to collect comprehensive inventory data of airports, which is a stepping stone towards better environmental assessments and better insight into areas that airports need to improve to reduce their environmental impact.