Life Cycle Assessment of Plastic Components in the Production of Automotive Filter

Due to climate change, the demand for green production processes and green products have become important. The manufacturing industry is among the most active high environmental impact sectors. The industry should know the environmental impact of their production process. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is one method to analyze the environmental impact of the product during its lifetime, starting from material extraction, energy consumption until the end of its usage. The D.J. is a manufacturing company that produces plastic components for the automotive filter using a horizontal injection molding machine. Every year the company uses ten different types of thermoplastic materials for its products. LCA has been carried out to analyze the environmental impact of one-year production of each material using the SimaPro program as its tool. The higher environmental impact in the manufacturing stage was produced by low-density polyethylene (LDPE) material. The transportation process of material caused other effects from the location of the supplier to the factory and the energy consumed during the running machine. The results show that using the bigger transportation truck capacity, changing raw material and using lower energy machines, and managing a recycling process of automotive filters should be done to reduce the environmental impact of products.