A novel approach to assess the products' global environmental impacts by considering pollution transfer phenomena

Abstract

As environmental issues become more serious, governments and customers are more sensitive about the environmental impacts which are produced by products. Many methods have been proposed to assess environmental impacts. The interdependent relationship among different lifecycle phases must be considered during the assessment of environmental impacts as the complex network relationship existing in different phases. The network is built on the phenomena that the output of one lifecycle phase may be the input of the other phases. The existing environmental impacts assessment adapts the idea of collecting all the potential data from all the lifecycle phases which is quite time-consuming. With the aim of describing the pollution transfer varied in a phase caused by the mass of materials changed in the lifecycle phases, this paper innovatively proposes a matrix-based approach to depict the interdependent relationship. A case study of printed circuit board production is conducted. The main lifecycle phases are taken into account and the results show that the new approach can more precisely assess the global environmental impacts of different designs.