Financial and environmental sustainability in manufacturing of crepe rubber in terms of material flow analysis, material flow cost accounting and life cycle assessment

The natural rubber (NR) processing industry plays a critical role in the economies of many developing countries, particularly in Asia. Among the different types of NR, crepe rubber holds a significant position, as it is used to produce pharmaceutical and surgical rubber items, and also articles that are in contact with foods. At present, the crepe rubber manufacturing has been challenged by low productivity, rising cost of production, and environmental issues. Therefore, this study was aimed to assess the feasibility in the adoption of sustainable manufacturing practices in the crepe rubber production as a case study in Sri Lanka. This study consisted of three steps: 1) quantification of material and economic losses and global warming potential (GWP) via material flow analysis (MFA), material flow cost accounting (MFCA), and life cycle assessment (LCA) on a gate-to-gate basis, 2) developing proposals of improvement options with the help of Pareto and What-if analyses, field interviews, and the existing literature; and 3) validation of suggested improvement options through the re-execution of MFA, MFCA, and LCA. For 1 MT of rubber input, the underlying economic losses and GWP impact in the current manufacturing process were identified as LKR 19,585 and 279.3 kg CO2e with the values of 7% and 13% for Relative Standard Deviation, respectively. As improvement options, reduction options of water, chemicals, electricity, milling duration were proposed. It revealed that adoption of these reduction options could mainly reduce 32,064 kg of water and 30.1 kWh of electricity resulting in 5.3% of cost savings and a 4.3% of GWP impact reduction. Other implications associated with improvement options and their limitations are also discussed.