Waste management Life Cycle Assessment: the case of a reciprocating air compressor in Brazil

Choose an environmentally End-of-Life (EoL) strategy is not an easy task. From a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) point of view, depending on the processes and destinations applied after use, the entire life cycle is affected, even earlier steps, such as the acquisition of raw materials and manufacturing. This paper aimed to assess the environmental impacts of an air compressor in Brazil, from cradle to the grave, with focus on the comparison of three waste management alternatives. We defined a Remanufacturing, Recycling and Landfilling scenarios following European Directive on waste management hierarchy. LCA methodology was applied to evaluate the potentials impacts on Global Warming, Abiotic Resource Depletion, Total Cumulative Energy Demand and Land Occupation based on primary data collected by the Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM). The case study indicates that the hotspot of this product system occurs in the use phase due the high demand of energy during its long life span. This predominance is such that it overcomes the differences among the three EoL scenarios. Removing this phase in LCA's result interpretation we found that for all categories Remanufacturing has the best environmental performance followed by Recycling and Landfilling. Remanufacturing was able to reduce the environmental impact by more than 40% compared to Landfilling through a reduced consumption of raw materials, manufacturing processes and environmental gains of avoided products.