Avaliação do ciclo de vida do copo plástico reutilizável adotado na UTFPR Câmpus Ponta Grossa

Abstract

There is a growing concern about incorporating sustainable development into production processes, products and services. This concern is also present in Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), which are responsible for many environmental aspects. In order to incorporate sustainability in its management and operations, HEIs can use several practices and tools, and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is one of them. In this work, the LCA tool was used to evaluate the environmental performance of the reusable plastic cups adopted in the university restaurant of the Universidade Tecnológica Federal do Paraná (UTFPR), Ponta Grossa campus. The applied methodology consists on the review of the literature on sustainability in HEI and Life Cycle Assessment, followed by the LCA study, based on the ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 standards. The functional unit was defined as 800 uses of the reusable plastic cup by a regular student in UTFPR, washing it with 1.73 liters of water and 0.36 milliliters of neutral detergent after each use and the reference flow was calculated for one cup. The plastic cups were evaluated using the software Umberto NXT Universal, through the impact categories of potential global warming, eutrophication potential and resource depletion, using respectively the IPCC 2013, CML 2001 and ILCD 2016 methods. For the three evaluated categories, the obtained results demonstrate that the production of raw materials is the stage of the life cycle with the greatest impact, mainly due to the processes of soap production and water treatment. The use stage is the second stage that contributes the most to the impacts in the life cycle, due to the wastewater treatment process. With the identification of the processes that contribute the most to generate negative impacts, suggestions for environmental improvements were proposed for UTFPR decision makers, aiming to reduce these impacts.