LIFE CYCLE INVENTORY AND DATA APPLICATION PROTOCOL FOR THE AUTOMOTIVE PAINT PROCESSES

Lift Cycle Analysis (LCA) and Life Cycle Inventory (LCI) methods are used incrasingly in the automotive industry to quantify the environmental impacts during vehicle manufacturing. Automotive coating processes are of particular interest as they contribute significantly to the environmental burden with emissions released to air, water, and land, along with the use of substantial amounts of energy and raw materials. Recently, the online NREL LCI Database was developed to characterize the environmental impacts of products and processes in the North American manufacturing sector, including automotive production. For automotive coatings, three unit processes represent the majority of environmental impacts: pretreatment, E-coat, and topcoat. The complexity of the automotive coating processes, how-ever, poses a significant challenge for the practical application of LCI information. This article extends pretreatment LCI data previously presented at FutureCoat! 2007, with detailed LCI data for the E-coat and topcoat processes. Furthermore, an LCI data application protocol is proposed to allow LCI reference data to be used to estimate LCI results for a different manufacturing facility or scenario. The analysis examines several variables for their effect on extrapolating NREL reference data, including: coated surface area, paint process, production volume/cycle length, and vehicle type. For the coating process, the applicability of manufacturing LCI data is shown to depend primarily on coated surface area and production volume.