A Life Cycle Assessment Case Study Of Ground Rubber Production From Scrap Tires

China is not only the world’s largest rubber consuming country, but also a nation short of rubber resources. Scrapped tires reuse become the new growth point of the national economy. Ground Rubber is considered as the main way, and there were lots of environmental impact in the surrounding area, which has threatened the environment health and the life of people. Thus, evaluating the potential environmental impact of the processing of ground rubber would be with great significance.Life Cycle Assessment is regarded as one of the most effective tool of environmental management in the21st century and has already been widely used. By introducing and applying the assessment on the processing of ground rubber, environmental impact analysis based on Life cycle assessment benefits for promoting the sustainable development of ground rubber industry.In the view of processing, A company that presents the advanced ground rubber production level was chosen as the example. And the environmental impact assessment software SimaPro7.3currently used popularly in the world was employed in the paper to perform Life Cycle Assessment on the processing of ground rubber. According to assessment results and life cycle inventory, improvement measures were given. The main conclusions are as follows:In processing ground rubber, Human Health is the dominant damage category at damage category level, Resp. inorganics is the most serious impacts. Devulcanization has the most environmental impacts of about73.1%; Applying clean energy and adding proper environmental protection equipment can contribute to cleaner production and environmentally friendly process.