V7_1/2018_1

Concepts of LCA-acceleration in sustainable manufacturing

Michal KOZDERKA1, Bertrand ROSE1, Emmanuel CAILLAUD1

1 Université de Strasbourg, laboratoire Icube

ICube UMR 7357 – Laboratoire des sciences de l’ingénieur, de l’informatique et de l’imagerie

300 bd Sébastien Brant – CS 10413 – F-67412 Illkirch Cedex

mkozderka@unistra.fr

 

ABSTRACT. Manufacturing industry is more than ever under pressure to decrease its product’s environmental impacts and to preserve its economic viability on the saturated European markets. One elegant way to treat the intersection of these two problem is ecodesign, which proved to be economically beneficial and to have positive impacts on the product’s design. In this paper, we focus on the key part of ecodesign – environmental impact analysis, represented by Lifecycle Assessment (LCA). Based on a literature review we identify one of the LCA’s most important unresolved issue – duration and we review three concepts helping to make the study quicker.

These concepts are simplifications, parametric LCA approaches and Product Category Rules (PCR)-based concepts, like the Environmental Product Declarations (EPD). In the paper, we give a lot of space to the parametric LCA approaches, which lack a clear definition in literature and we give a lot of importance to the PCR-based concept, which seems to have a very important and growing impact on sustainable manufacturing.

In conclusion, we propose to integrate some parametric approaches into PCRs, because despite their quick popularity growth across most of the industries, they still have space for improvement. They are an excellent communication tool, but their initial purpose was not the LCA acceleration.

KEYWORDS: Ecodesign, LCA, Manufacturing industry, Parametric LCA, EPD, PCR; Eco-conception, ACV, Production industrielle, ACV paramétrique, DEP