Analysis of environmental impact for industry products: Case study: paper manufacturing

Pulp and paper industry has a high environmental impact that occurs in all phases of the paper lifecycle, from fibre acquisition to manufacturing and final to disposal. Reducing paper consumption is an important step to diminish the environmental impacts. Substitution of virgin fibres with recovered fibres reduces the demand for wood and requires less energy. For evaluation of the environmental impacts and potential impacts associated with a paper product can be used various methodologies like lifecycle assessment (LCA). The goal of this paper is to determine the environmental performance of paper products technological process based on the evaluation of four scenarios: the first scenario consists in paper products manufactured from virgin fibre and the other three scenarios contain the manufacturing process of paper with recovered fibre as raw materials and with different environmental impacts (80%, 60% and 40%). The evaluation was realized using GaBi4 software that supports every stage of the analysis, from data collection to quantification of the results and highlights the performance of the evaluated processes. GaBi4 offers the possibility to characterize the inventory results in several impact categories based on different methodologies, such as: CML 2001, CML 96, EDIP 1997, EDIP 2003, EI99, etc.