Monetization of health damages from road noise with implications for monetizing health impacts in life cycle assessment

There are decision situations where environmental impacts need to be compared with other costs or benefits that by their nature are expressed in terms of money. Supporting these decisions may require the expression of environmental impacts in monetary units. Using the example of health impacts from road noise we apply five different monetization approaches and quantify the monetary values of one year of sleep disturbance (CHF 2500-16000) and interference with communication (1500-10000). In Life Cycle Assessment many health endpoints need to be evaluated at the same time. Therefore, we illustrate here the transferability problem between health impacts measured in disability adjusted life years (DALYs) and monetized health impacts, using the example of health impacts due to 1000 truck kilometres. It is concluded that available monetization methods need careful adaptation for their use to monetize environmental health impacts, that the DALY accounting system may support the systematic monetization and the selection of relevant health endpoints, and that it may well be justified for LCA purposes to perform some novel primary willingness to pay studies. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.