Life Cycle Assessment Study On Rubber Hose

Rubber products industry is one of the important basic industries in China.Since2010,China has become the world's largest producer of rubber products.The production process of rubber products not only consumes a lot of energy,but also produces pollutants such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides,which endanger the ecological environment and human health.Therefore,it is urgent to quantify the environmental impacts of rubber products in their whole life cycle,which is of great significance to the sustainable development of the entire industry.By analyzing the existing life cycle assessment(LCA)researches in the field of rubber products,it is found that the current LCA studies in rubber field mainly focus on tires.In addition,most of the relevant literature aims to evaluate and compare the environmental impacts of waste tires in their end-of-life stage,while a few studies focus on the whole life cycle of tires.Moreover,the inconsistencies of existing studies in system boundaries,functional units,allocation methods,data sources and environmental impact assessment methods hinder the direct comparison between relevant studies.Concrete conveying rubber hose used in construction site is one of the most widely used rubber products.In previous laboratory research,a high wear-resistant rubber hose has been developed and put into production.However,there is currently a lack of research on the environmental and economic impacts of the rubber hose during its life cycle.In this study,four kinds of rubber hoses with different wear resistance(the wear resistance from small to large are traditional rubber hose,low wear-resistant rubber hose,wear-resistant rubber hose,high wear-resistant rubber hose)as the research object,using the life cycle assessment and life cycle cost analysis(LCCA)methods,build a life cycle model of rubber hose,conduct "cradle to grave" LCA research,and convert environmental impacts into external environmental costs,combined with economic costs,establish a comprehensive evaluation framework for rubber hose,and finally analyze the evaluation results.It is found that the choice of functional unit can greatly affect the final evaluation results.In the case of “a rubber hose” as the functional unit,the total life cycle cost of traditional rubber hose is the lowest,followed by low wear-resistant rubber hose,wear-resistant rubber hose and high wear-resistant rubber hose.However,when considering actual use function and taking “conveying one cubic meter of concrete” as the functional unit,the evaluation results are completely opposite,and the comprehensive performance of the high wear-resistant hose is the best.The sensitivity analysis results showed that chloroprene rubber was more sensitive to the total cost of hose life cycle,and the final cost would increase 1.03% if the material dosage increased by 10%.However,fuel consumption in use stage is the variable that has the greatest impact on the total cost.When this variable changes by the same percentage,the evaluation result changes by 5.77%.The results of this study are helpful to improve the understanding of the environmental impacts of rubber hose and promote the ecological design of this products.