Life-cycle assessment

Life-cycle assessment is a standardised framework to measure the environmental impact of a product through every phase of its life – from production to waste (or recycling, etc.)

Research Question

To verify how our product brings environmental impact to the recycling industry and spot out potential changes to increase sustainability of our product.

Main Phases

01 Goal and Scope

Defining the aim of the study, and setting up the system boundaries to simplify calculation

What is Product Life Cycle?

Stages:

Raw materials
Processing
Transport
Retail/ Use
Waste

Source: https://ecochain.com/knowledge/life-cycle-assessment-lca-guide/

Environmental Impact to the Recycling Industry

With our machine

Transportation to RSP

Electricity for operation

Current recycling bins

Frequent transportation to RSP

Bottles sent to landfill due to contamination

Sorting machine/ manpower

Scope

Examining the carbon emissions of RealCycle in TKO during operation and transportation in one year

Bills of Materials

Electricity Usage

Assumptions:

Recyclables collected fully fill a 9-tonnes truck every week
Number of acceptance and rejection are the same
The recycling service providers is located in Tai Po
We saved the remaining 21% of bottles from being sent to landfill

Calculation details:

Insights

Materials

Recycled aluminium can be used to replace the highly used aluminium profile in the machine. It costs less energy and money

Education

The energy used for rejection is much higher than the one of acceptance. Better instructions may reduce the frequency for rejections

Collection

To prolong the life span of the machine, we could redesign the storage by reducing the force that collectors required to take out the recyclables

Business model

Our idea now couldn't minimize the transportation between two RSPs on exchanging recyclables in different plastic types. Collaboration on using the same machine as a new business model could be considered

ISDN2001/2002: Second Year Design Project