1998-11-30
Life Cycle Assessment Study of a Bumper 982175
These days, environmental issues have become more and more of a concern in the automobile industry. Especially, one of the environmental impact evaluation methodologies currently being developed and standardized is the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA). LCA is a quantitative method for evaluating the environmental impact of a product throughout its life cycle.
Our purpose for studying LCA is to choose environmentally friendly materials. We had used polyurethane (PU) as the material for the bumper fascia. We intended to adopt polypropylene (PP) as a replacement for polyurethane and decided to conduct a comparative LCA for the bumper assembly using PU and PP fascia.
In this paper, the total life cycle (raw material, manufacturing, transportation, use and end of life) of the bumper will be studied through inventory analysis, impact assessment and interpretation. The impact assessment was done by the Delphi-like and Index method (Eco-scarcity and Environmental Theme (ET) long term methodologies). The results show that the PU bumper poses a greater burden than PP bumper in terms of total environmental impact1. The result of key issue identification shows that improvements are needed in the fascia painting process. Several alternative processes were suggested after the key issue identification process and we conducted the LCA for one of them again.
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