Priorização de processos elementares e adaptação de bases de dados de inventários do ciclo de vida (ICVs)

Abstract

The need for regional data in Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies is common to many developing countries, which are looking for representative results to local processes. In the absence of databases representing the local production, the studies generally use the available data. However, the development of a consolidated database requires investments as technical training, time and financial resources. An alternative to solve this problem is the adaptation of databases, which has the advantage of not requiring so many investments. It also allows the use of data from other processes that are part of the product life cycle in a globalizing world. Thus, the aim of this study is to promote the efficient development of inventory data applicable to LCA studies of national services and manufactured products, through the adaptation of databases. Therefore, the priority elementary processes for adaptation were determined using MATLAB R2013a software, using as data source the report of the top hundred industrial products, published by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE). In addition to these products, the national electricity generation was also included in the research. The database selected for adaptation was the ecoinvent v.3.1 and the correspondence between the items of the IBGE's report and the database was found to 54 products. The results of process contribution calculated using IMPACT 2002+ method showed that less than 1% of the total amount of unit processes in the database is important to prioritization. A ranking of process was established by weighting the results of the four damage areas of method. The most sensitive flows were determined by application of the perturbation analysis, both for the technological and environmental interventions. This analysis indicated that, for all the categories, less than 100 flows had multipliers higher than 1%, which represents about 0.03% of the total number of quantified flows. After determination of the priority flows and relevant processes, comparison of production lines was qualitatively performed to some processes, such as milk, pig iron and clinker. The determination of priority unit processes and sensitive flows, as well as their adaptation, was a pertinent approach in the attempt to direct the first efforts to overcome the difficulties in creating datasets of national products.