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The objective of this project was to demonstrate and validate two currently used, publicly available Department of Defense (DoD) green and sustainable remediation (GSR) spreadsheet tools (SiteWise™ and SRT™) and benchmark these tools against an industry accepted Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA) software package (SimaPro®).
SimaPro® is for-purchase software that is widely used for many types of LCA evaluations, but it is not specifically designed for assessment of soil and groundwater remedies. SiteWise™ and SRT™ are publicly available (freeware) spreadsheet-based tools that are specifically designed for soil and groundwater remedies. Comparison of footprints calculated by SimaPro® and the DoD tools were made for the following five sustainability metrics:
In this project, SimaPro® was applied for six demonstration sites that consisted of a total of 20 remedy alternatives. For three of the demonstration sites (Army/Navy installations), consisting of 15 remedial alternatives, the SiteWise™ tool was applied for comparison to the SimaPro® results. For the other three demonstration sites (Air Force installations), consisting of 5 remedial alternatives, the SRT™ tool was applied for comparison to the SimaPro® results. Each tool uses footprint factors (e.g., how much NOx is emitted per gallon of diesel fuel combusted) to convert an input or process into a footprint.
Key findings and conclusions of the demonstration included the following:
The results suggest that use of the SiteWiseTM and SRTTM tools should generally be preferred over the SimaPro® tool for DoD projects. SimaPro® would be recommended for cases where outputs for footprints other than those offered by the DoD tools are needed.
It is recommended that future efforts focus on improving standardization between tools used for DoD projects. Based on this demonstration and validation project, efforts to standardize footprint factors are difficult to base on results from SimaPro® and would be better achieved by consensus of experts in the field. Improved consistency between DoD tools would also result from standardizing the sustainability metric for global warming to equivalent carbon dioxide (CO2e). The DoD tools should continue to be improved over time to add any items or processes that are not well represented in the tools.