Estudo comparativo dos métodos de avaliação do impacto ambiental causado pela produção de aço

Abstract

Life cycle assessment (LCA) estimates the aspects and potential environmental impacts throughout a product’s life cycle. This assessment goes from raw material extraction, through production, use, end-of-life treatment, recycling and final disposal. To implement LCA, quantification methods of potential environmental impact can be used. The steel production process involves several steps. In some of them, it is necessary to use fossil fuel to produce energy. In these steps, there are many emissions of pollutants to the environment. Thus, this work has the goal to assess the environmental impact caused by the production of steel using SimaPro software. The process of steel production is modeled at the software SimaPro and the methods used to calculate the potential environmental impact were: EDIP 2003, IMPACT 2002+, CML-IA and ReCiPe. Through the software database (base Ecoinvent v.3) data are found in relation to the multiples inputs and outputs of the production process. Between the applied methods, the ReCiPe method is the most appropriate to the environmental assessment of steel’s life cycle, because it better represents the Brazilian reality. The results of this method shows that the steel production process yields bigger damages on the category related to the damages to resource availability, in particular, metal and fossil depletion, having nickel as the substance that contributes the most to the resources depletion.