Green Evaluation Of Beer Equipment Based On Life Cycle Theory

As a big beer production and consumption country,the annual output of beer in China has entered a negative growth mode with the deep adjustment of industry and the continuous changes of market segments.At the same time,a wide variety of craft beer with a rich taste has begun to emerge.How to comprehensively evaluate the green performance of craft beer equipment has become an important issue in the sustainable development of beer industry in order to achieve better environmental influences.However,there is little research on the green evaluation of beer equipment,which leads to the lack of reliable and effective methods to improve the green performance of beer equipment.In this study,the 500-liter craft beer equipment is selected as the research object to evaluate its green preformance.The 21 indicators are identified from five aspects(resources,energy,environment,cost,and technology)to construct a green evaluation index system for the craft beer equipment.The analytic hierarchy process and entropy weight method based on game theory are used to weight each index in the evaluation system.The multi-attribute decision-making method based on multiple methods is used to comprehensively evaluate the green performance of craft beer equipment with different design schemes.As a result,the ranking of green performance for these different design choices is obtained.Aiming at the multi-dimensional output problem of the evaluation process,the principal component analysis method is applied to the global sensitivity analysis to identify the key variables affecting the green design of craft beer equipment.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)The life cycle of craft beer equipment can be divided into five stages:manufacturing,packaging,use,maintenance,and waste recycling.The largest environmental emissions occur at the manufacturing stage,which accounts for 66.10%of total emissions.The next stage is the use phase,which is responsible for 32.99%of total emissions.The waste recycling phase is the environmental benefit phase,and the other phases have slight influences in this case study.(2)The analytic hierarchy process and entropy weight method based on game theory were used to assign the weightings for the green indicators of brewing beer equipment.The results show that resource indicator accounts for 44.8%,environmental indicator 27.8%,energy indicator 14.8%,cost indicator 7.9%,and technical indicator 4.7%.(3)Eight craft beer systems were selected from three categorical factors:saccharification system material,wort heating method,and power generation method.Five different multi-attribute decision-making methods were used in this study.The results show that the contributions to environmental impact from large to small are power generation method,heating method,and saccharification system material.The system with the least environmental impact is composed of stainless steel saccharification system,electric heating boiled wort,and hydroelectric power.(4)The global sensitivity analysis with the multi-dimensional output results show that the important parameters affecting the green design of beer equipment include heating efficiency,heating loss,diameter-height ratio,and stainless steel density.These parameters should be focused on during the design process.This study provides a comprehensive evaluation method of green design for beer equipment,which can quantify the environmental impact.The evaluation method proposed in this paper can be generalization to the green design evaluation of equipment in other industries in order to promote the transformation of green manufacturing and industrial upgrading in China.