Economic and Environmental Impacts of Product Service Lifetime: A Life-Cycle Perspective

This paper presents a generic model for evaluating the economic and environmental impacts of product service lifetime, which is important and useful in the design and management of PSS. From a PSS provider’s perspective, the presented model conducts life-cycle costing (LCC) and life-cycle assessment (LCA) simultaneously and quantifies the total life-cycle cost and environmental impact associated with the product lifetime. The entire life cycle of the product is considered, including its manufacturing (or purchase), usage, maintenance, and end-of-life treatment. Applied with a sensitivity analysis of varying product lifetime, the model can identify the optimal service lifetime at which the life-cycle cost and environmental impact can be minimized. To illustrate, the developed model is applied to the example of a piece of currently-marketed agricultural machinery.

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