The Life Cycle Assessment Of Sanitary Ware In China

Building material is the important basic material and also the raw material. With the fast development of economic, the building material industry has developed quickly. At the same time the development of ceramic industry has waste a lot of resources and has brought badly influence to the environment. Ceramic tiles and Sanitary wares play an important role in our building material industry and it has been the top since 1993 when we produced the most amount ceramic products. From then China has given the most contribution to the world. However, the large number input has been the burden to the environment and we should do our best to catch up with ceramic developed countries.In this paper LCA has been carried out in order to find the hot spots of the typical sanitary ware industry. According to ISO14040-14043 and GB/T24040-24043, combining with equivalency model, Life cycle assessment method system of sanitary ware industry in China was studied in the paper first. And the system was built at the real condition of our country. The analysis of sanitary ware industry in 2005 has shown that the main affection of sanitary ware were AP, GWP, HT, ADP, POCP and NP. The critical point has been found in ADP and AP which were 46.0% and 29.2% in the system and were serious during the manufacture and raw material making processes. The analysis of typical sanitary ware enterprise has shown that material pre-production processes were the hot spots during the manufacture in the assessment because it will use a lot of mine resources. Otherwise the analyses of firing process has shown that the Roller kiln with cleaning fuel has the least affect to the environment and the Interval kiln tunnel with dead oil has the worst affect of the three.This study of LCA in sanitary ware industry will help ceramic industry and even building material industry a lot. It will be the consultant to the Energy-saving technologies and the Recycling economy. It will help to built up the standards of Cleaner production in ceramic industry. Also it will be the strongly supplement to the material database and will give some advises to the design and improvement of ceramic kilns.