Achieve Cleaner Production By Life Cycle Assessment Method

Traditional cleaner production audit often only concerned about the manufacture, but the gathering of raw material, the usage of the product, as well as its final disposal. This may bring false outcome, which is clean to the phase of production but not to the whole life cycle. Life cycle assessment is a "cradle to grave" approach for industrial systems. This evaluation begins with the production of raw materials from the earth to the manufacture and usage of the product and ends at the point when all materials are returned to the earth. In this paper, the cleaner production and life cycle assessment are systematically expatiated and then systemic methods are proposed. For the fist time, made a study of the method which to achieve cleaner production by life cycle assessment according to the life cycle of expanded polystyrene.By the inventory analysis of expanded polystyrene, the author ascertained the following impact categories of acidification, global warming potential, abiotic resources depletion, eutrophication, stratospheric ozone depletion and photochemical oxidant formation. The classification, characterization and weighting of discharge and depletion datum for expanded polystyrene are based on the previous impact categories. The standard datum shows that global warming potential from the phase of gathering raw materials, global warming potential and photochemical oxidant formation of the manufacture stage and global warming potential of disposal phase made up the most important part of the overall environmental burdens. Each of them contributed to overall environmental burdens preponderate over 10 percent. Four cleaner production scenarios are brought forward.We know the environmental impact complex index of cleaner production scenarios of F2,F3,F4 are reduced from 500.94×10-12a to 436.611×10-12a,442.9×10-12 and 469.933×10-12a respectively through the effort appraisement of cleaner production scenarios. The total environmental impact complex index is reduced from 500.94×10-12a to 375.5×10-12a also. The cleaner production scenarios also gained economic benefit to some extent, the sale profit margin, employed capital reward rate, capital income ratio, societal contribution rate and societal accumulation rate are added form 26.67%,18.7%,5.875%,11.3% and 26.55% before the cleaner production to 31.53%,27.4%,13.75%,13.6% and 36.03% respectively after the cleaner production.The usage of life cycle assessment in cleaner production made it clear that carries through cleaner production by life cycle assessment method can take into account the entire life cycle of product, and acquire environmental benefit and financial gain. Cleaner production is achieved to some degree by life cycle assessment method.