Reference no: EM133839235

Assignment: Life Cycle Analysis - Consumer Review Project

Select an existing "consumer product" (examples from class include beverage bottle types, baby diaper materials, soap detergent forms, coffee brewer methods, types of meat sandwiches, etc.) and conduct a life cycle analysis on this product and one of its competitors to compare their environmental impacts. Ideally, you should choose a product that you use regularly such that your analysis will be relevant and informative to your own life. Your analysis should include:

1. A discussion of an appropriate functional unit to use in your analysis. Choose at least 1 metric that you want to evaluate for your study (e.g., CO2 emissions, energy usage, solid waste generated, volume of water used, etc.)

2. A process tree/ flow diagram that includes the main life cycle stages of your product. Use this diagram to illustrate the system boundaries your analysis will use (e.g., will you include CO2 emissions from the tractor during the harvesting process, or are the processes similar enough that you can just study the manufacturing/assembly process?)

3. Your research on usable data sources and types (LCI). You should only use reputable sources to build your inventory. (e.g., data generated by national laboratories, or tables you find in scholarly journal papers. I suggest searching on scholar.google.com for papers related to your study.) The tables in the appendices of The Hitch Hiker's Guide to LC maybe also be a starting point for your inventory data collection.

4. Your impact assessment (LCIA). Conduct your impact assessment by scaling your inventory with an appropriate scaling factor, if applicable (recall the cloth vs disposable diaper example). Then, perform any calculations as needed (recall the bus/car study, or your HW problems).

5. Your data interpretation, including suggestions for improvements, and limitations of your study. Limitations might include, for example, how certain assumptions you made affected your results and how if you adjust those assumptions your results would change.

Report Guidelines:

A. Introduction

a. Explain the context for why this study is important. This could be a study to influence your own behavioral choices, or it could have global implications!

b. Introduce your two products: what they are, how they work, how you a consumer would use them, what benefits they provide to the consumer, etc. Make sure to include a figure of each, with a caption.

B. Methods:

a. Describe your process for determining your functional unit.

b. Provide a figure illustrating your flow diagram, with the system boundary drawn on the figure.

i. Note that all figures in the report should be properly captioned and referenced in text. For example, "Figure 1 above shows ..."

c. Summarize the literature you found for each inventory metric you pulled.

i. For example, "Chen and Hoople (2016) provide the production energy of a Hydroflask waterbottle as 100 MJ/kg of stainless steel. However, their description of "production energy" only includes the melting of the stainless steel and not the subsequent molding process. Since we were unable to find another reputable source describing molding process, we left this manufacturing stage out of our system boundaries for both products."

C. Results:

a. Do NOT include any hand-drawn figures or equations. Recreate all of your work digitally (professionally) using the Microsoft Word Equation Editor, and use Powerpoint to recreate your figures (e.g., using textboxes, shapes, or Smart Art).

b. In this section, walk the reader through your LCIA. Lay out all the calculations you made in an easy to read fashion.

i. Note that equations should all be numbered and properly referenced. For example, "We calculated the final production energy for the Hydroflask, as shown below in Eq. 4."

D. Discussion:

a. Discuss the conclusions of your LCIA in this section, and draw some conclusions from your analysis. Include a short discussion of how this might impact consumer behavior towards or away from the environmental conclusion you drew.

b. Provide some reflection about your conclusion. What other options might you have considered that would make this study "better", "more correct", or "more sustainable?

i. For example, in a comparison of Kindle vs paper books, the team reflected at the end that it might be unreasonable to assume that every paper book is purchased (and only read once/ by one person) when a common method of obtaining books is through the library.

c. Describe any limitations of your study, such as unequal system boundaries between products, difficult assumptions or judgment calls you needed to make in order to use or perform calculations.

E. Conclusions:

a. Briefly recap your study (i.e., write a paragraph like an abstract here).

b. Reference back to your introduction where you described why this study is important. Did your study change your mind on your own behavior?

F. References