A fuzzy logic-based lifecycle comparison of digital and film cameras

This paper presents a fuzzy logic-based lifecycle assessment (LCA) model. This model considers criteria of environmental, recycling, together with cost, quality, reliability and performance variables, and covers a product lifecycle from design, material procurement, manufacturing, usage to disposal. Traditional LCA suffers from problems of imprecision/incomplete input data and difficult interpretation of output data. The proposed fuzzy logic-based LCA model can resolve these problems by employing a fuzzy model such that both accurate and imprecise data can be easily handled and the results are understandable to experts and nonexperts. The input data that include economic inventory, physical value, dimensionless indicator or even qualitative measure (such as performance and reliability) are all well modeled by using the proposed method. The output can be interpreted using linguistic variables. An interesting comparison of digital cameras (DC) and film cameras (FC) is performed by applying this method. Among all the lifecycle stages of DC and FC, usage and disposal stages are two important ones and is the focus of this paper. Energy consumption, media material consumption, solid waste, chemical wastes, fluid waste, and recyclability are successfully and seamlessly combined for evaluating the environmental impacts of DC and FC.