Page 138 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

122 3 Life Cycle Inventory Analysis

SETAC’s ‘code of practice’ provides extensive recommendations on how to proceed
with these difficult cases. 132)
The required data are often present within a company or at suppliers but in a
form useless for LCI. They have to be transformed or newly gathered in a way
applicable for LCIs which implies a substantial effort.
Things improve if an operational input–output analysis of the plant or the
production site has already been performed, 133) for example, as part of the opera-
tional environmental assessment within an environmental management system.
Both methods complement each other, particularly if producer and supplier(s) as
part of the supply chain co-operate (chain management). 134) Exaggerated secrecy,
however, often prevents the confident cooperation of producer, supplier and client
out of a fear of revealing production secrets and of financial cheating by a – though
limited – disclosure of production costs and price structuring.

Example: Data formats in the unit process ‘Punching of Steel Sheet’ (fictitious
data)

In an enterprise steel sheets are punched as moulded parts from a Coil. The
simplest case is assumed: A company in Germany punches only one type, which
in this form is transported to only one customer, who builds two of these sheet
metals into one of his products P. The Coils originate from one supplier only.
Available data could, for example, be conveyed as follows:
• Input
5
a. electric energy: 5 × 10 kWh a −1
b. coils: 1000 t a −1
c. transportation distance: 100 km.
• Output
6
a. product (P): 1.2 × 10 pieces a −1
b. scrap iron (blend): 40 t a −1 (back to supplier)
c. transport distance: 50 km.

The example shows that data of this format cannot be used directly for a calculation
of an LCA of product P with the fU ‘1 piece of P’.

The transformation of operational data into unit process data which are applicable
in an LCA will be shown by the electricity consumption of ‘Punching of Steel Sheets’
in the above example (see also Figure 3.27).
The following must be considered in detail:

132) Beaufort-Langeveld et al., 2003.
133) Braunschweig and M¨ uller-Wenk, 1993; see the European environmental management system
for enterprises and organizations EMAS and the international standard ISO 14001 (ISO, 2004);
Finkbeiner et al., 1998.
134) Udo de Haes and De Snoo, 1996; a co-operation within the supply chain is also requested by the
European Union’s chemicals legislation REACH (2006).