Environmental impact of two electrical products with reference to the energy-using products directive

Abstract

High energy consumption is one of the major factors that contributes to global warming. Connected to this, a directive has been approved by the European Union for establishing a legal framework to govern eco-design of energy-using products. This technical note reveals life cycle analysis of two electrical products, which rely on the same rechargeable battery system (i.e. the same energy source) for operations, with respect to the requirements of the aforementioned directive. Results concur with the argument that energy consumption of this sort of product plays a dominant role in terms of a variety of environmental impacts (like emission to air). Based on the results of this study, eco-design alternatives can be derived accordingly so that energy consumption and the existing solution can be benchmarked, as required by the directive.

Keywords:

• life cycle assessment
• energy-using products
• eco-design
• energy consumption
• electrical products

1. Introduction

Eco-design has become more important in the past two decades (Hadj Taieb et al. 2010), partly due to legislative pressure (Maxwell and van der Vorst 2003, Ijomah and Chiodo 2010). It ‘covers any design activity which aims at improving the environmental performance of a product’ (Hauschild et al. 2004, p. 2). In other words, it is the process of taking environmental impacts into design considerations (Alting and Jogensen 1993, Doi et al. 2010). It will become a mandatory requirement for products entering the European market, because a directive with respect to eco-design is soon to become a law (European Council 2005). This is referred to as ‘EuP directive’ hereafter. It is not surprising to say electrical and electronic equipments or products are affected by this directive most (Ling 2006). In the beginning, 12 product groups were selected for some preparatory studies, from which related environment measures and assessment methodologies can be provided as a reference for practitioners to follow. The number of preparatory studies (or product groups in other words) was extended to more than 20 (Gurauskienė and Varžinskas 2010).

Undoubtedly, a proper tool should be employed for assessing environmental impacts with respect to the requirements of eco-design or, at least, to the requirements of the EuP directive. Life cycle analysis or assessment (LCA) is a scientific approach that can be utilised to analyse the environmental impacts of a product in all phases of its life cycle (e.g. Eberle et al. 2007, Bakker et al. 2010). More specifically, LCA can facilitate the quantification of environmental impacts throughout the product's life cycle (Nielsen and Wenzel 2002, Del Borghi et al. 2007). Yung et al. (2008) developed a framework for conducting LCA with respect to the requirements of the EuP directive, which form the foundation of analysis in this study.

As a matter of fact, the framework proposed by Yung et al. (2008) originated from the ISO 14000 series for LCA. In summary, the whole LCA procedures involve four steps (Westkämper et al. 2000):

	Step 1. Goal definition and scope.
	Step 2. Inventory analysis.
	Step 3. Impact assessment.
	Step 4. Interpretation.

However, Yung et al. (2008) fine-tuned the framework to form a new model for EuP applications. This can be briefly summarised in Figure 1. Since it is not the intention of the authors to repeat the discussions on the framework here, readers are referred to Yung et al. (2008) for more details.

Figure 1 Framework for LCA with respect to the EuP directive (adopted from Yung et al. 2008).

Although LCA is useful by offering more reliable information on the environmental impacts, it is also a complicated tool in the sense that extensive data collection is needed, which is time consuming. In addition, the result is meaningless if associated eco-design options are not proposed accordingly (Kang et al. 2010). Therefore, how to interpret the result is also important in completing the analysis (Wever et al. 2008).

As mentioned above, electrical and electronic products are the major target group under the scope of the EuP directive. It would be beneficial to the industry if some case studies (like the preparatory studies) are available to the practitioners as a source of reference. Published literature, however, was more focused on the theoretical aspects of LCA and the associated topics. Therefore, this study attempts to bridge this gap by reporting a case study on applying LCA of an electrical product family with reference to the EuP directive, which is also not included in the preparatory studies for the time being.

2. Background of the case

The product owner in this case study is a public listed company and is a worldwide leader in the related industrial electrical products market. The manufacturing facilities of the company are located in China, featuring high volume capacity and low cost of operations due to economies of scale. The company is also enthusiastic about developing products under its own brand name. In short, the company is well established in terms of its new product development and manufacturing capabilities. However, no formal eco-design philosophy was taken into account.

The two case products in this study are cordless power drill and handheld vacuum cleaner. They belong to a product family which can be powered up by the same rechargeable battery. That means the same battery can be used in both products. In fact, these two products are not the only products in this innovative product family. Some of the product varieties contain both products in a package so that they could also be considered as a single product in some cases. In addition, these products are selected, because they fulfil all the requirements under the EuP directive, including annual production volume, energy usage and so on. Therefore, they are assessed together in this research. Using the same battery for different products is already a good eco-design practice. However, the designers do not incorporate the requirements of the EuP directive during the course of product design. In this study, LCA is performed on these selected products to bridge this gap, so that the associated eco-design improvement options can be determined accordingly.

3. The LCA

This section summarises the four steps for LCA with respect to the framework discussed in Section 2. Therefore, this section is organised based on the four steps.

3.1 Step 1. Goal definition and scope

The scope of the LCA is very clear because of the EuP directive. Energy-using products are the targets for conducting LCA, subject to the objectives of the directive. In addition, products are selected only if they are not one of the preparatory studies as mentioned earlier. Otherwise, reference could be found from the reports of the said studies.

3.2 Step 2. Inventory analysis (including data collection)

Once the product has been chosen for analysis, the project team defines all necessary information and requests the manufacturer to transfer it to the project team. The most basic information is the ‘Bill of Material’ (BOM; Kang et al. 2010). The BOM shows a list of components used to assemble the final product. Nevertheless, the BOM usually provides high-level information only. Therefore, tailor-made questionnaires are prepared so that detail information can be obtained from the company. Factory visits were arranged so that the actual manufacturing processes could be investigated and recorded, and follow-up communications (including face-to-face meetings) were organised to gather adequate information for the modelling of different phases.

In this study, a professional software package called GaBi was employed to find the life cycle inventory, and hence LCA, of the case products. In relation to the assessment as stated in the EuP directive, significant environmental aspects should be identified with reference to the following phases of the life cycle of a product: (i) selection, acquisition and use of raw materials (materials phase); (ii) manufacturing phase; (iii) packaging, transportation and distribution phase; (iv) installation and maintenance phase; (v) use phase and (vi) end-of-life phase (reuse, recycle, incineration disposal, etc.). In this case study, however, the ‘installation and maintenance’ phase is omitted, because the products under analysis are portable battery-driven devices and no installation or maintenance is required. In this connection, only five phases are involved. Subject to the requirements of the EuP directive, the following measurements are recorded with regard to the different stages of the life cycle: (a) energy consumption, (b) emissions to air, (c) emissions to water, (d) emissions to soil and (e) wastes.

3.3 Step 3. Impact assessment

Figure 2 depicts the energy consumption (item (a) above) of different phases of the two products. Values in the y-axis represent the percentage contribution of each phase to the measurement (similar definition applies to other figures).

Figure 2 LCA result – energy consumption. Remark: A, material phase; B, manufacturing phase; C, packaging, transportation; and distribution phase; D, use phase; and E, end-of-life phase.

It is obvious that the use phase of both products accounts for the majority of the consumption (more than 60 and 70% for the drill and the cleaner, respectively). This is followed by the material phase, which means material selection is also important from eco-design perspective. The other three phases are negligible in this sense.

In fact, similar findings can be found for different measurements and two of them, emission to air and wastes generated (item (b) and item (e) above), are shown in Figures 3 and 4, respectively. The measurement ‘emission to air’ is a consolidated measurement of different types of emissions, including heavy metals, organic (such as methanol, ethane and so on) and inorganic (such as carbon dioxide, sulphur dioxide and so on) emissions, particles to air, and so on. The measurement ‘waste generated’ includes parameters such as various hazardous wastes, stockpiles goods (like ash), and so on. They are all reported by and assessable from the GaBi software.

Figure 3 LCA result – emission to air. Remark: A, material phase; B, manufacturing phase; C, packaging, transportation; and distribution phase; D, use phase; and E, end-of-life phase.

Figure 4 LCA result – wastes generated. Remark: A, material phase; B, manufacturing phase; C, packaging, transportation; and distribution phase; D, use phase; and E, end-of-life phase.

From Figures 3 and 4, the contribution of the use phase to the two measurements is around three-fourth. Since the results of different measurements are similar, only selected results are discussed above for simplicity. Based on Figures 2-4, the use phase is predominated in terms of producing negative environmental impact, and hence should be pinpointed for any improvement options. Nevertheless, unlike the other three phases, the material phase cannot be underestimated as its contribution could not be ignored.

The authors would like to remind the readers that the above measurements (and some others) are the consolidated views with respect to the EuP directive. For a more thorough understanding of the LCA, it could be further broken into analysis of individual environmental impact (like emission of carbon dioxide instead of emission of air as a whole).

3.4 Step 4. Interpretation

Implication from these results is that emphasis should be put on how to reduce energy consumption of the two products from an eco-design perspective. This is also partly related to the material selection of the products, despite the fact that the impact of this phase is not as prominent as the use phase. Obviously, a more detailed understanding of each phase should be obtained before some eco-design options can be provided.

On top of the above findings, it is found that the profiles on different measurements are quite similar for the two products. An implication to the industry can be obtained directly that companies can learn from previous LCA in the earlier design phase from similar products so that eco-design activities can be less time consuming, in view of the complexity of conducting an LCA.

4. Conclusion

The note takes the initiatives to study the environmental impacts of two electrical products with reference to the EuP directive. The LCA result is in line with what is suggested in the literature that energy consumption is the biggest problem among different life cycle phases (e.g. Dietmair and Verl 2009). Intuitively, applying eco-design philosophy to these products can help to reduce the associated impacts. This serves as a future research direction in realising such improvement.

To accomplish this objective, however, this is not as straightforward as developing the LCA results. The usage of these products not only involves smart product design for reducing energy consumption, but also behavioural issues of users on how they use the products in real-life applications. As Aoe (2007) advocates that eco-design not only can be achieved by adopting advanced technology, but also involves changing people's outlook on value or lifestyles. Sensitivity analysis for screening out uncertainty is also important in verifying the findings. In this regard, more effort has to be focused on this future research direction. This is also the reason why only LCA result is discussed in this note. The eco-design improvement will be summarised in the future.

Another suggestion for the practitioners based on the above is that LCA of similar products may be translated into analysis of energy consumption in the earlier design stage. This can not only help to minimise the time for conducting LCA but also help the designers to ‘get things right the first time’. For example, the research team in a later stage discovered that the standby consumption of the battery charger while charging is quite high, which definitely has room for improvement from an eco-design perspective. In this regard, analysis and improvement can be done without the LCA. Nevertheless, LCA is still needed in the later stages of a product development cycle as LCA can give the designers a full picture of the environmental profile of the products in question.

LCA, like many other tools in different areas, is not a generic cure to eco-design, unfortunately. One of the limitations of applying LCA, like this study, will result in product-oriented analysis. Obviously, eco-design activities should not be restricted to product level, but to a wider focus which integrates the life cycle perspective to strategic formulation of all environmental management activities (Flores et al. 2008). This will then form a major criterion for making decisions of a company. In fact, eco-design may result in lower product cost in some cases (Chan 2007, Doi et al. 2009).

Acknowledgements

The work described in this research was fully supported by a grant from the Innovation and Technology Commission of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (Project No. GHP/050/05). The authors would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers who provided the authors with insightful and constructive comments, which definitely helped the authors to improve the quality of this paper.