Exploring Opportunities to Improve Life Cycle Environmental Performance of a Complex Product

Abstract

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is an essential tool for achieving design for life cycle. An LCA examines all stages of a product’s life cycle and gives a quantitative assessment of its potential environmental impact. The results of the LCA help identify priority areas for improvement and ways to reduce environmental impacts. This paper presents a comprehensive LCA approach to quantitative assessment of environmental impact for industrial off-road equipment. This paper describes how LCA can be applied to off-road equipment and how it can be used to improve the environmental performance of a product. Six potential opportunities for reducing the environmental impact of off-road equipment are explored, and sensitivity analyses are presented as a tool for evaluating the effectiveness of those solutions. The LCA approach is demonstrated with the example of a construction machine.