Eco-indicators of Machining Processes

Abstract

Products have a variety of environmental impacts throughout their life cycle. To conserve resources and to protect the environment these impacts should be reduced to a minimum. The easiest way to reduce the environmental impacts of a product is to do it at an early point of the product development process because at this time there are many opportunities to change something without increased costs. At this time, however, it is often too complex to carry out a complete life cycle assessment (LCA) of the product to identify the ecological weak points. Therefore, EcoDesign-methods are used during product development to assess the expected environmental impacts to minimize them over the whole product life cycle. In the research project EcoScreen manufacturing processes were investigated to generate a reliable database for their life cycle inventory (LCI). These LCI datasets were used to generate simple to use eco-indicators to estimate the environmental impacts without carrying out a complete LCA. For the first time, such eco-indicator values, considering all the relevant environmental effects that are generated during these processes, have been created for the machining of parts.

The research project “Kurzbilanzierung von Fertigung und Abfallbehandlung beim EcoDesign (EcoScreen)” was financed by the program “Forschung für die Praxis” from the Hessen State Ministry for Higher Education, Research and the Arts. Partners were the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences and the company e-hoch-3, Darmstadt.The research project “Kurzbilanzierung von Fertigung und Abfallbehandlung beim EcoDesign (EcoScreen)” was financed by the program “Forschung für die Praxis” from the Hessen State Ministry for Higher Education, Research and the Arts. Partners were the Frankfurt University of Applied Sciences, Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences and the company e-hoch-3, Darmstadt.