Avaliação ambiental do setor de transporte de cargas: comparação de métodos

Abstract

The transport sector is responsible for great part of unrenewable resources use and gases emissions contributing to green house effect. The trucks employment in cargo transport predominates in Brazil. These trucks, however, impact on the environment during their use as well as in other stages of their life cycle, since the extraction of resources till the final discart of product. To evaluate the priorities for the diminishing environment impact, several different methods had been elaborated. This study consist in comparing the result of three of these methods: the Life Cycle Analysis (LCA), the Exergy Analysis and the Emergetic Analysis. The LCA is a methodology that enables the environment evaluation in all phases of the product life cycle. The accomplishment stages of LCA include the objective and target definition, the inventory analysis, the impact evaluation and the results interpretation. Otherwise, the emergetic analysis is carried through the materialflux, energy, money and information thet provide us a value, in this case, the emergy. The exergy is used as a tactical unit for usual energy supplies and materials, products and pollutants. The compare these tree methodologies, two different cargo capacity trucks had been slected, with data of resources use and pollutants production for an internationaldatabase, the ecoinvent. The results and conclusions are presented about the evaluation methods of life cycle impact, exergy analysis and emergetic analysis.