Risk-sensitive life cycle assessment of green composites for automotive applications

Abstract Green composites promise lower environmental impacts than traditional composites. So, they bear a significant potential for enhancing the sustainability of production and products in automotive and other industries. For the evaluation of fulfilling such a promise by assessing and interpreting the environmental burdens caused by organizations' resources, processes, and products, the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology has been established. Consequently, LCA has been applied to evaluate the eco-friendliness of green composites in some studies. However, no survey exists that summarizes the way of applying LCA to green composites and its results. Furthermore, there is always the threat that LCA results may not fully reflect the environmental burdens of the object under evaluation, meaning there is the danger of wrong result, considerations and decisions. Such a danger results from different types of uncertainties (constituting modeling risks) as well as the variability of the real situations in which green composites are manufactured, used, recycled, etc. (real-world risks). Since these risks are considerable especially for green composites due to the lack of knowledge, scarcity of data, and the high degree of variability, there is a need to take them systematically into account when conducting an LCA for green composites and deciding based on its results. This chapter proposes the conduction of risk-sensitive LCA of green composites to analyze and control modeling as well as real-world risks and thus contribute to enhancing the significance of LCA results and improve the quality of decisions based on LCA results. It begins with an overview of green composites based on natural fibers, their advantages and disadvantages, and the existing LCA studies referring to them. In the following, the uncertainties causing modeling risks are described and approaches to handle them by an adequate risk management approach are suggested. Afterwards, possible real-world risks related with LCA of green composites are structured and, again, risk management measures are proposed. In addition, an example from the automotive industry is introduced for demonstrating the approaches.