Life Cycle Based Evaluation and Interpretation of Technology Chains in Manufacturing

This chapter describes a methodology to gather, assess and interpret the ecological impact of technology chains within industrial manufacturing. The explained methodology leads to significant information about high consuming processes and important energy and material flows. Industrial companies cannot allocate the exact consumptions in the manufacturing processes. Especially costs and consumptions for media like compressed air or centrally provided lubricants are mostly distributed by means of the number of machines rather than by actual consumption figures. By utilising the presented methodology not only information about real consumptions, but furthermore ecological data can be generated for various purposes such as ecological product declarations and evaluation of alternative production chains. The methodology is exemplarily applied in two industrial case studies and results of these studies are shown in this chapter.

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