Reduction of environmental impact of products through hotspot analysis in LCA

Abstract

Substantial effort is made against the depletion of natural resources by designing sustainable products using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method. However, LCA does not indicate which unit manufacturing process has the highest opportunity for improvements with least resource allocation, that it where lies the hotspots. This study aims to find hotspots through LCA and help industries to identify the scopes for easy improvements. In this study, we consider ‘water taps’ manufactured by three companies and compute the Green House Gases (GHGs) emissions for each stage of a product, and find the lowest and average values of it. Next, we find the hotspots by comparing these values with the individual values of each process. Once hotspots are found, a company can focus only on these areas for fast reduction of GHGs. The practical effect would be reduction in carbon footprint, raw materials, energy, wastage of materials, and increase in economic benefit.