Life Cycle Assessment Of Aluminum Production In China

As the most widely used non-ferrous metal, aluminium productions have significant applications in transportation, packaging, construction, etc. During last decade, aluminium industry in china has increased dramatically with the rapid economic development and industrialization. For instance, approximately 5.55 million tons and 22.06 million tons of primary aluminium was produced in China in 2003 and 2013 respectively, showing an average increase of 15.2% during a span of ten years.Aluminium industry is an energy-intensive and thereby produces heavy environmental burdens associated with resources extraction and pollutant emissions. Air pollution (e.g., fluoride compounds, carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, hydrogen sulfide and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAH)) always generated during the manufacture of aluminum production。Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a useful tool to assess the environmental impacts of product, process, or activities generated during its whole life cycle from cradle to grave. LCA analysis of aluminum production has been extensively studied. LCA research in most Chinese areas mainly adopted European model, which is wicked in both representative and regional aspect. However, the life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) model specifically for ecosystems and human health has the features of regionalization, uncertainties, and geographical variability. There is a major weakness of applying existing LCIA-characterization models to China’s products, since such model do not properly model fate, exposure, and damage processes based on China’s geography, population size, and environment situation. Thus, it is likely to lead to a biased LCA estimation of the impact of aluminum products. In addition, different characterization factor are covered by different methods, which pose serious consistency problems in life cycle assessments, specifically for comparative assertions. To solve those questions, a Chinese LCA model has been used in this study to evaluate the carcinogens, non-carcinogens and freshwater ecotoxicity categories, which is updated basing on the national geography, population size, and environmental situation. These three categories might vary per region and obtaining regionalized results could reduce the regional effect of European models on the LCIA analysis in China. The remaining categories are from the world commonly used models, like IMPACTWorld+ model and ReCipe. The aim of this study is to provide a detailed LCA of aluminum production at macro level for enabling the review practices for aluminum production in China looking at their whole life cycle, improving the evaluation of national pollutant emission inventory and its environmental effect, and determining the level of confidence in the assertion that secondary aluminum is more environmentally friendly than primary one.