Fall 2015 Page 1

MIE1715H: Life Cycle Engineering

Exercise 1: Due: October 5, 2015
1. Find one example of a product where the largest or most detrimental environmental impact
persumably derived from each of the following:
Raw Material Acquisition
Production
Consumption
Disposal
2. In the example below only the outputs of products are displayed for the sake of simplicity.
Functional unit can be based on inputs as well as outputs. The goal of the study is to compare
plywood box with other packaging options (e.g., carton box, plastic box). Choose suitable functional
unit of the inventorying the CO2 emissions from the system (i.e., CO2 emission per functional unit).
Fall 2015 Page 2

3. In the example of the question 2, the plywood box is manufactured from 12kg of plywood, 1.78kg
of steel strips, and 0.22kg of steel nails. The functional unit in this example is one plywood box
(since there is no comparison with other types of boxes). The steel producer provide both the strip
manufacturer and nail manufacturer with steel. No recycle material is used. Transportation is
excluded. The weight of the output (product) from each unit process is documented in the flow chart
in question 2. CO2 emissions from each unit process is:
Process
CO2 emissions
Unit
Production Steel
1210
g/kg steel
Hot rolling of steel
100
g/kg strip
strip
Zinc coating of steel
15
g/kg coated strip
strip
Production of nails
120
g/kg nails
Production of plywood 128
g/kg plywood
Production of plywood 178
g/plywood box
box