Chapter 6: Sustainable PLM

Title: Possibilities and limits of the product carbon footprint

Author(s): Urte Brand, Stefan Gößling-Reisemann

Address: Faculty 4 – Production Engineering, Department 10 – Technological Design and Development, University of Bremen, Enrique-Schmidt-Straße 7, 28359 Bremen, Germany | Faculty 4 – Production Engineering, Department 10 – Technological Design and Development, University of Bremen, Enrique-Schmidt-Straße 7, 28359 Bremen, Germany

Reference: International Conference on Product Lifecycle Management 2010 pp. 308 - 318

Abstract/Summary: Apart from the economic assessment the ecological assessment of products – in form of life cycle assessments (LCAs), for example – is playing today an important role. Due to these cost-intensive and time-consuming methods, many companies only calculate the most important environmental impacts of their products such as greenhouse gas emissions which are represented by the product carbon footprint (PCF). But which are the most important environmental impacts? Are selected environmental impacts sufficient to classify products and their life cycles as environmentally friendly? Because of the few empirical studies carried out on these subjects we conducted a full LCA of a deep-frozen food product including the calculation of a PCF. The LCA results show that the product life cycle causes far more environmental impacts than just greenhouse gas emissions. Furthermore the study demonstrates that there is a danger of life cycle phases being not identified as environmentally harmful if the PCF is solely calculated.

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