Life cycle assessment in the furniture industry: the case study of an office cabinet

Cleaner Production and LCA as Complementary Tools in Environmental Assessment: Discussing Tradeoffs Assessment in a Case of Study within the Wood Sector in Brazil

“…In this case, the re-designed chair presented higher values, mostly owing to the change in the material of the seat (plywood) at those stages of the life cycle. Other literature findings regarding wood base products and processed wood products, such as plywood, had also indicated that most of the environmental impacts occur outside the plant in the modern furniture industry in Brazil [26], so this finding was considered aligned with those observations. A detail of the main substances reported in this characterization factor is presented in Table 8.…”

The lifecycle of wood from tropical forests in Costa Rica

“…Once all transport emissions were considered, these were similar to those reported in other studies (i.e. 49.6 kg CO2-eq m -3 in this study vs 49 kg CO2-eq m -3 in Brazil) (Medeiros et al, 2017).…”

“…We excluded the cascade use of wood via recycling as this is not important in the country (Solera, 2014). Due to the complexity of data gathering and their low contribution to total climate impact (Medeiros, Tavares, Rapôso, & Kiperstok, 2017;Suter et al, 2016), emissions from inputs other than wood, and downstream emissions from use and maintenance were approximated based on assumptions. Other biophysical effects such as changes in albedo or evapotranspiration were also excluded, but in tropical forests these can be low because selective logging removes only a small number of stems per hectare (R. A.…”

“…assigning responsibility for the environmental impact of a multi-functional process amongst its functions or products) (Ford-Robertson, 2003;Reap et al, 2008). For electricity, we used running time and the energy demand of each machine (Medeiros et al, 2017) together with monthly electricity consumption. Fuels, oil and hydraulic fluids were mostly used by wheel loaders, agricultural tractors, forklifts and chainsaws and were reported monthly.…”

Preface

“…Many traditional LCA studies have been conducted to assess the environmental performance of products. This special issue presents some of the studies that have focused on using LCA as a rigorous method for testing the perceived environmental advantages of products such as biodiesel from beef tallow (Magalini et al 2017), hotspots analysis of office furniture (Medeiros et al 2017), or environmental comparison of products such as bricks and palm oil (Prateep Na Talang et al 2017;Bunchai et al 2017) and processes such as waste treatment and construction (Hassanain et al 2017;Sedpho et al 2017;Salzer et al 2017). In addition to conventional LCAs, allocation methods have also been considered in complex multiproduct systems such as oil refineries using multi-scale modeling .…”