Life Cycle Assessment of Industrial Cooling Towers

Sustainability and life cycle thinking is becoming part of companies’ “green identity”. For this reason, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a common tool to assess the environmental impacts of manufactured products in order to improve it—starting with raw material selection to efficiency improvements of manufacturing processes and optimization of operation. Focusing the manufacturing stage, usually only the machines and processes directly related to the manufacturing are taken into account for assessment. Peripheral processes e.g. pump and pipe systems and technical building services (TBS) e.g. air conditioning, process water supply, are often neglected due to poor data availability. Supplying cooling water for production machines, cooling towers (CTs) are a central part of the industrial TBS—and therefore part of almost every manufacturing system. Neglecting the environmental impact of CT would result in a major white spot when accomplish a LCA. In order to close this gap, this paper presents the first LCA of industrial CTs showing the hot spots of environmental impacts along the entire CT life cycle.