Life cycle approach to sustainability assessment: a case study of remanufactured alternators

Abstract

ArticleLife cycle approach to sustainability assessment: A case study of remanufactured alternators Journal of Remanufacturing Provided in Cooperation with: SpringerOpenSuggested Citation: Schau, Erwin M.; Traverso, Marzia; Finkbeiner, Matthias (2012) : Life cycle approach to sustainability assessment: A case study of remanufactured alternators, Journal of Remanufacturing, ISSN 2210-4690, Springer, Heidelberg, Vol. 2, pp. 1-14, http://dx.doi.org/10.1186/2210 This Version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/108887 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Sustainability is an international issue with increasing concern and becomes a crucial driver for the industry in international competition. Sustainability encompasses the three dimensions: environment, society and economy. This paper presents the results from a sustainability assessment of a product. To prevent burden shifting, the whole life cycle of the products is necessary to be taken into account. For the environmental dimension, life cycle assessment (LCA) has been practiced for nearly 40 years and is the only one standardised by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) (14040 and 14044). Life cycle approaches for the social and economic dimensions are currently under development. Life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) is a complementary implementation of the three techniques: LCA (environmental), life cycle costing (LCC -economic) and social LCA (SLCA -social). This contribution applies the state-of-the-art LCSA on remanufacturing of alternators aiming at supporting managers and product developers in their decision-making to design product and plant. The alternator is the electricity generator in the automobile vehicle which produces the needed electricity. LCA and LCC are used to assess three different alternator design scenarios (namely conventional, lightweight and ultra-lightweight). The LCA and LCC results show that the conventional alternator is the most promising one. LCSA of three different locations (Germany, India and Sierra Leone) for setting the remanufacturing mini-factory, a worldwide applicable container, are investigated on all three different sustainability dimensions: LCA, LCC and SLCA. The location choice is determined by the SLCA and the design alternatives by the LCA and LCC. The case study results show that remanufacturing potentially causes about 12% of the emissions and costs compared to producing new parts. The conventional alternator with housing of iron cast performs better in LCA...

Review of Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment and Potential for Its Adoption at an Automotive Company

“…Further case studies [40,76,77], and improving data availability, especially for S-LCA [74,77], were additionally identified as potential areas for improvement.…”

An integrated fuzzy approach for evaluating remanufacturing alternatives of a product design

“…According to Kim et al [31], the alternator has the highest remanufacturing rate. Schau et al [11] presented a case study of remanufactured alternators, in which they applied life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) to three different alternator designs. However, their LCSA approach and derived results are also dependent on the underlying assumptions and data availability.…”

“…In this study, the authors make reference to the case to demonstrate how the proposed model can facilitate and simplify the evaluation process from a sustainable remanufacturing design perspective. With reference to the case [11], the main remanufacturing processes are defined and the associated evaluation criteria within each process are identified as illustrated in Table 2. The total number of remanufacturing processes for evaluation is not necessary to be restricted to six as shown in Table 2.…”

“…The life cycle concept is also applicable to remanufacturing process. For instance, Schau et al [11] conducted an LCA study of remanufactured alternators. Three designs were considered and the associated environmental impacts were evaluated.…”

An Overview of Used-Products Remanufacturing

“…The automotive sector particularly has a strong and long history of remanufacturing (Seitz, 2007;Golinska, & Kawa, 2011) where the alternator has the highest remanufacturing rate (Schau, Traverso, & Finkbeiner, 2012). Remanufacturing is also gaining scientific significance in a variety of industries that include single use-devices for hospitals, such as wheelchairs and hearing aids (Srivastava, 2004) cellular phones (Guide Jr, Jayaraman, & Linton, 2003b) and truck tyres (Lebreton & Tuma, 2006).…”