2008 Volume 59 Issue 1 Pages 68-73
Evaluating the environmental load and impact of industrial products throughout their lifecycles is important, and lifecycle assessment (LCA) will be indispensable for future manufacturing. As for LCA, it is described in ISO 14040, and many reports on the results of LCA have been published to date. However, the execution of LCA is difficult, especially for the manufacturing stage of fabrication industries, due to the complexity and particularity of the processes. It is difficult to examine the process precisely from an environmental viewpoint through conventional LCA in which the manufacturing stage is composed of a few unit processes. To cope with this problem, a manufacturing centered LCA with a hierarchical structure configuration is proposed, and this new assessment is applied to a machining process. The effective way to reduce environmental load and impact is to examine these values in the stage of designing parts and products. Since CAD/CAM systems are used in the designing stage for parts and processes, using of data from the systems is effective for environmental evaluation. In this paper, an environmental evaluation of the manufacturing stage in LCA is carried out. The fabrication of an automotive sensor component is evaluated. The results obtained concerning the environmental load and impact demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed LCA method.