Strategical relevance of LCA environmental impacts for an eAxle

Sustainability is an increasingly important topic today and is at the centre of the decision making for the businesses and policies today. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is widely used to support the sustainable development. With the LCA, the environmental impact caused by the product in its complete lifecycle can be evaluated. Climate change is a key LCA impact category that is lying the centre of the policy making based on sustainability development goals (SDGs) of UN. All the businesses, governments, NGOs are driven to achieve the net zero emission targets. But it is also important to also look beyond climate change, as there in an increasing legislative requirement that the businesses will need to disclose more data related to sustainability. In order to comply with these regulations, it’s important to evaluate, monitor and improve all the different impact categories. In this thesis, the other impact categories of the LCA like resource usage, acidification, eutrophication, ecotoxicity, photochemical ozone formation are also evaluated, and their relevance is established. In this study, an LCA is performed for a product i.e. eAxle. It is cradle to gate analysis performed in order to identify which life cycle stage is a hotspot. The focus of this study is on the lifecycle stage that emerged as a hotspot i.e., the extraction and manufacturing of the raw materials. As a part of the study the hotspots were identified, quantified, and hierarchized. The impact assessment method that is used in this LCA is ReCiPe endpoint method as that helps to draw relevance to the impact categories. The goal of this LCA was to understand the strategic relevance of all the other LCA impact categories along with climate change. This study investigates the different environment impact categories and understand which impact categories out of those can be important in future for the decision makers apart from climate change. The strategic relevance of the impact categories is based on normalisation of the environmental impact of the eAxle with the environmental impact by one person in a month. Planetary boundaries are used as a benchmark to hierarchize the relevance of the different impact categories associated with the product. The critical impact categories were identified based on the percentage contribution to the overall impact and with reference to the state of the planetary boundaries. The results of the LCA were interpreted to identify the critical impact categories and conclusions were drawn as to which impact category were strategically more relevant for the product. Based on the environmental impact the raw materials of concern were identified and highlighted. The environmental impact caused by the different modes of transport was investigated and conclusions were drawn. The recommendations on strategies or interventions that are needed in future were based on the interpretations of the result. It is important that the LCA results are integrated while designing the product by the design team to monitor the environment impact. These results can strategically identify opportunities like rethinking sourcing decisions, innovating sustainable products, complying with the regulations and marketing the product as eco-friendly.