Study On Cleaner Production For Alcohol Distillery With The Tool Of LCA

Along with the development of human society, environment pollution has been becoming increasingly serious. Environmental protection is an important issue in building a harmonious society. Industry pollution is a great part of environmental pollution. People have come through the process from end-of-pipe control to pollution prevention to combat industrial pollution. The latter also refers to cleaner production. In cleaner production, early as at the design stage, actions are considered to reduce the use of raw material, reduce energy consumption, and/or reduce pollutant emissions. Therefore, cleaner production focuses on source control. The concept of cleaner production is a new and innovative in industrial pollution control, and a great step forward in industrial environmental management. What's more, cleaner production is also oriented to sustainable development. To promote and implement cleaner production, it is necessary to conduct a cleaner production auditing. With the result of cleaner production auditing, the enterprise recognize the main issues in production associated with environment impact, and then uses or develops responding techniques to overcome the problems. Therefore, cleaner production auditing is a important step in implementing cleaner production.Faced with the shortage of resources and energy, and the increasingly severer problem of environmental pollution, the concept and methodology of life-cycle assessment (LCA) have been brought forward. LCA is a management tool that makes quantitative analysis and qualitative assessment. LCA can be used on several levels. On the governmental level, LCA can help make policies and plans, e.g. product oriented policy, waste management policy and the general process-oriented policy. On the enterprises' level, LCA focuses on all the production processes, and analyzes and assesses environmental impacts on energy and resource consumption, and pollutant emission. Therefore, LCA is an effective tool that promotes cleaner production auditing and cleaner production implementation. The use of LCA methodology in cleaner production auditing, with comprehensive inventory analysis and quantitative assessment, can help establish the connection between production and environmental stresses. Consequently, enterprises can get technical and decision support in environmental management.This paper introduces and discusses the idea of LCA and technology framework. The ISO 14040 standard issued in 1997, defines the technical method of LCA involved with four parts: goal and scope definition, inventory analysis, impact assessment, and interpretation. The study of this paper is based on the four steps of the LCA technical method.The LCA research is involved with massive data and information. It is a great challenge to LCA study how to process the data and information effectively and conveniently. What's more, for a better continuity of the LCA research, several LCA technological methods need to form systematic models. In order to solve these issues above, kinds of LCA software emerge. In this paper, lately LCA software SimaPro is introduced. SimaPro is developed by the Environmental Science Center (CML) of Leiden University in Dutch, and promotes worldwide on the support of UNEP. The software uses the concept of 'Assembly' to realize modulation of poduct system. This paper studies the way SimaPro works, and introduces the application method in detail.Alcohol production is a conventional industry, and also an industry that consumes large quantity of energy and disposes large quantity of pollutants, of which the environmental issue is a Long-standing one. As a trend, to manage the environmental issue in alcohol industry with the idea of cleaner production makes great sense. Therefore, Chinese government has drafted a provisional standard of technology requirement on cleaner production in alcohol industry. However, up to the present, there is no domestic research found on alcohol LCA at the enterprises' level.This thesis studies the LCA methodology, and then establishes the method of cleaner production auditing based on LCA for alcohol distilleries in China. This thesis also makes a LCA study of Xintai alcohol distillery of Taichang as a case study. In the case study, the LCA software SimaPro is used. On life-cycle inventory analysis, acidification, greenhouse, energy, eutrophication, human toxicity and photochemical smog are made impact types associated with this study. CML 1992 v2.1 is used as an impact assessment model in this study. In the characterization step, inventory result is processed. Analysis result is rate of contributions to environmental impacts of each unit progress. On a comprehensive analysis of the characterization result, conclusions are found: in the whole alcohol production system, waste mash solution from the distillation process and air pollutants from coal-burning boilers have the largest contribution to environment impacts. Besides, CO2 from the fermentation process also has large contribution to environmental impacts. Thus, key unit progresses are identified, and consequently, 4 sets of projects for cleaner production are proposed.