Life Cycle Assessment Of Dishwasher And Its Application Research

Nowadays, the increasing environmental problems have led to a serious threat on the survival of mankind. How can people reduce the environmental impacts to the permissible level, meanwhile meeting their own needs? The problem needs to be solved through Green Design. Green design is the inevitable choice for sustainable development and the most effective way to eliminate environment pollution. Life cycle assessment, as a key technology of green design, takes a very active role for the analysis of the impacts on the environment in the life cycle of products. Life cycle assessment has been a great success in many industries, and plays an important role in the process of decision-making. Life cycle assessment has become a powerful tool to analyze the environmental characteristics of products and support the design decision.This paper applied life cycle assessment in the green design of dishwasher, put forward a method of multi-objective impact assessment based on LCIA. This method improves the traditional method that only focuses on single objective of harmfulness, and comprehensively considers the targets of harmfulness and the difficulty of dealing with the harmfulness. In the design phase, following the principle that the environmental impacts more harmful and more difficult to be dealt with should be allocated with top priority and the environmental impacts less harmful and easy to be dealt with should be least consideration, this paper established a new multi-objective evaluation method. At first, the environmental performance of the dishwasher is evaluated using the life cycle assessment software tool-Gabi, and the equivalent value of the environmental impacts are found out after the step of characterization, then the composite environmental impacts of the dishwasher are calculated using AHP method on the targets of harmfulness and the difficulty of dealing with the harmfulness, the sequence of the composite environment impacts importance and the total index of environment impacts of the dishwasher are acquired, which all can effectively support the improvement and selection of green design plan. At last, the design plan is improved according to evaluation result and some better results are achieved.