Research Of Life Cycle Assessment And Application In The Tire Industry

Resources and energy shortages have become a global social issues and environmental degradation are threatening human health. These problems arise more and more attention for Life Cycle Assessment method. It has become powerful analysis and decision support tools for environmental features.With the fast development of the automotive industry, the tire industry also has rapid progress. They improved our standard of living and create economic benefits, but also produced a growing number of environmental problems. However, there is not too much research about tire lifecycle assessment currently, and the fact that we lack specific data of environmental impacts throughout the whole life cycle of the tire makes it difficult to solve the specific environmental issues arising from the tire.In general, the weighting factor of life cycle assessment is a constant value, but because of the complexity of environmental impact, it is difficult to obtain the single score by a costant weighting factor. Therefore, this paper presents an AHP method with an interval comparison matrix as the life cycle assessment method to obtain the weighting factors of impact categories and damage categories, and solved by genetic algorithm to ensure consistency of interval comparison matrix and reliability of weighting factor.Based on the weighting factors of impact categories and damage categories, this paper develops an application for tire industry T-LCA with Qt– an interface development software and DBTools Manager– a database development software. T-LCA can carry out the tire life cycle assessment under the framework of ISO 14000 including the four procedures: goal and scope definition, life cycle inventory, life cycle impact assessment and life cycle interpretation.Then, this thesis establishs the whole life cycle assessment model of tire and builds a technical framework for life cycle assessment of tire based on the theory of life cycle assessment and T-LCA application. For the part of goal and scope definition, the article study the whole life cycle for the tire model 205/65/R/15 from raw materials acquisition, production, distribution, use to disposal; For the part of life cycle inventory, the article gives inventory of raw materials, natural resources, energy input and a variety of emission for every life stage; For the part of life cycle impact assessment, this article characterizes, normalizes and weights the data of inventory to obtain the environmental impact of carcinogens, respiratory organics, respiratory inorganic, climate change, radiation, ozone layer, ecotoxicity, acidification /eutrophication, land use ,minerals and fossil fuels for every life stage and the single score of three damage category: human health, ecosystem quality and resources for every life stage. For the part of life cycle interpretation, this thesis explains the evaluation results of impact assessment.Finally, the comparative environmental impact of the four kinds of treatment of end of life tire is carried out by the same way of characterization, normalisation and weighting to arrive at a single score.