Simplified Life Cycle Assessment and Analysis of Remanufacturing Cleaning Technologies

Remanufacturing cleaning can lay foundation for testing, painting and assembling waste products and components in remanufacturing procedure. Currently, high temperature decomposition and shot blasting cleaning are conventional industrial cleaning technologies for remanufacturing while supercritical CO2 cleaning and liquid blasting cleaning are the relatively new ones. This study completed by the method of simplified life cycle assessment aims at comparing the environmental impacts of the cleaning process of these two types of cleaning technologies. Most of the data were collected from a remanufacturing company directly and some laboratorial data were used to speculate about the industrial data for the difficulties of collection. The results indicate that, compared with conventional cleaning technologies, the new cleaning technologies are relatively environmental friendly since they are more favorable in terms of several environmental impact indicators such as GPW, AP, EP, ODP, POCP and most of emissions have been reduced dramatically. (C) 2015 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V.