Eco-efficiency Assessment Of Remanufactured Truck Engines Based On A Hybrid Approach Of Emergy And Life Cycle Assessment

With the rapid growth of economy, resource consumption and environmental pollution problems have attracted attention by governments. Acceleration of the industrialization process in China has brought the rapid growth of waste production. Therefore, effective recovery of wastes is important. Remanufacturing can recover used products to become the same or better than new products. However, remanufacturing need new inputs such as energy, materials, and labor. Evaluation of input efficiency requires a comprehensive assessment system.Based on literature review and the theory of remanufacturing and considering the development situation of China's remanufacturing enterprises, this dissertation put forward a hybrid approach of emergy and Life Cycle Assessment and it is used to do analysis using real data. First, theoretical analysis and literature review of emergy and life cycle assessment show that the method of life cycle assessment has the advantage of database construction and emission accounting, while emergy analysis can better account ecosystem service and transform all types of energy into solar emergy. Then, the combined emergy and life cycle assessment (ELCA) was established, which can directly and effectively evaluate the different types of inputs in the whole life cycle of remanufacturing products. The establishment of a comprehensive emergy index system is suitable for evaluating remanufacturing process using unit emergy value, emergy yield ratio, recyle yield ratio and so on. Finally, a typical Chinese remanufacturing company -Jinan Fuqiang Power Co., Ltd is taken as an example to illustratehow to use ELCA. The life cycle of a remanufacturing engine is identified and analyzed. In order to include more information of indicators, steel melted down-manufacturing process as the comparative target of the two systems were compared. The main results are:emergy input of remanufactured engine is only one-third of the traditional material recycling process; the recycle efficiency is twice of the traditional way. Related analysis is of some guiding significance in promoting government policies and the development of remanufacturing business.