Study On Carbon Footprints Of The Printing Service And Data Quality Analysis

Due to global climate change, carbon footprint of products and services has becoming attractive issue in terms of reducing of carbon dioxide emission.. In the paper, The carbon footprint assessment models were built based on printing taken as a service, which included system boundary, unit function, data collection and delete criterion in book and periodical printing and plastic flexible packaging printing services.The data collection scheme was completed after the on-spot investments were carried on in four typical book printing companies and two typical plastic flexible packaging printing companies. The primary data included original input and output, energy consumption, material consumption, waste generation and transportation, and second data, carbon emission factors, were also obtained.According to the characteristics of the book printing service industrial and data availability,1plate,1sheet and1sheet were chosen as function units in the study during the printing stages, respectively. The results showed that CTP plate is the mainly carbon emission source in the pro-printing stage, printing techniques have a significant impact on the printing carbon footprint, which accounted for about99percentages in total carbon footprint of book and periodical printing. It was showed that circulation process also impacted on the carbon footprint importantly in the post-print stage.In terms of carbon footprint of the plastic flexible packaging printing, lroller, lm2and1m2were selected as function units at the various printing stages, respectively. As showed of the results, rollers was the main source of carbon footprint at pro-printing stage, so how to choose roller providers is important for a printing company to reduce its carbon footprint. Besides, carbon emissions from chemicals were main sources at printing stage. At post-stage, different compound techniques resulted in different carbon emissions, carbon footprints of dry compound were higher than twice the extrusion compound.Combining the uncertainty and sensitivity, the method of evaluation of data quality was established during the carbon footprint assessment. Firstly, the DQI-Monte Carlo method was built to evaluate the primary and secondary data uncertainties. Then uncertainties of data and results were obtained base on the error transfer principle. Simultaneously, the key data in carbon footprint calculation were distinguished from other data using the sensitivity analysis. Those data with greater uncertainties and higher sensitivities would be the key data. So those data should be paid more attention in order to enhance credibility of the assessment results. For example, carbon footprint of the pro-printing in one of companies was208.69kgCO2-eq per roller with an uncertainty of18.01%, and the data from plate material was the key data.