Life Cycle Assessment of Residential Air Conditioners Considering the Benefits of Their Use: A Case Study in Indonesia

The global demand for air conditioners (ACs) has more than tripled since 1990, with 1.6 billion units currently in use. With the rapid economic and population growth of countries located in the hottest parts in the world, this trend is likely to continue in the future. The aim of this study was to show the benefits of introducing air conditioners with different materials or different technologies such as inverters with high energy-saving performance on the environment and human health in Indonesia. To evaluate the environmental impacts of the different technologies, a cradle-to-grave life cycle assessment (LCA) of air conditioners was conducted using the life-cycle impact assessment method based on endpoint modeling (LIME3). As expected, the use stage has the largest global warming potential (GWP), representing more than 90% of the impact, whereas copper and nickel have the most important impact in terms of resource consumption (about 50%). We found that the impacts are heavily dependent on the country’s energy mix, but reduction can be achieved by introducing better technologies. The integration factors from LIME3 were then applied to estimate the external cost of each model; the results showed that the use stage also has the most influence. Even though the impact of climate change is important, air pollution impact must be seriously considered as its impact was found to be the highest (about 60% of the total impact). The external cost was finally compared to the possible benefits produced by the introduction of air conditioning technologies during their 10-year life cycle. We found that the impacts are twice that of the benefit for the best model (USD 2003 vs. 1064); however, the novelty of this study is that the benefit was also considered. In the future, developing countries should promote AC models with inverters, refrigerants with low global warming impact such as natural refrigerants, and encourage the recycling of units as soon as possible. The energy mix for electricity production is also a key parameter to consider.