International Journal of Technical Research and Applications e-ISSN: 2320-8163, www.ijtra.com Volume 2, Issue 4 (July-Aug 2014), PP. 84-89 84 | Page THE CRADLE TO CRADLE LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT: A CASE STUDY Vishal Yashwant Bhise 1 , Ajay Kashikar 2 1Research Fellow- Master of Engineering, 2Assistant Professor Department of Mechanical Engineering- LTCoE, Navi Mumbai, India. Abstract — The growing environmental awareness among the society, customer, stakeholders and tremendous pressure of government bodies to comply with the environmental norms, the industries and professionals are forcing themselves towards the world class environmental management practices. By taking into account the trend, the work carried out on one of the product ‘Deflector Roll’. The roll undergoes heavy wear & tear, high compressive & torsional stresses; as a result it cracks/breaks after certain period of use. The new manufacturing creates environmental & human health burden through various processes performed on it. By taking this gap into account, the life cycle of roll, modelled in an eco-intelligent way so that after the useful life, the material is brought back into the techno sphere without waste. The proposed life cycle model consists of Extraction and Production of Raw Material, Manufacturing, Use, Remanufacturing, Reuse and finally Recycling. This modified framework enables to form the Cradle to Cradle life cycle loop by two ways, viz. while remanufacture/reuse the roll is brought back into the product system and while recycling again around 95% of material is brought back into the techno sphere. Further, in order to evaluate the environmental performance of roll with proposed model, the ‘Life Cycle Assessment’ tool is chosen. The roll is assessed through all of its life cycle phases. The inputs and outputs during each life cycle phase are collected and recorded. The assessment carried out on the modified life cycle model in one of the reputed LCA software tool ‘GaBi 6.’ In order to assess the life cycle impacts the ‘CML 2001’ methodology is adopted which consist of the impact categories like Global warming potential, Acidification, Ozone Layer depletion and many others. Further, the results show that the proposed model creates the negligible impacts during manufacturing, use, remanufacturing and reuse. Also, the two way formation of cradle to cradle loop concludes that the proposed product system model of roll is sustainable. Key words— Cradle to Cradle System, Life Cycle Assessment, Sustainability, LCA software tools, Recycling, Eco-effectiveness, Life cycle impacts, Sustainability Indicators. I.LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT Life cycle assessment is a tool to evaluate the environmental consequences of a Product/Project or activity thoroughly its entire life from extraction of raw material, Use, Disposal and its composition back to the element. The sum of all those phases is the life cycle of a product. LCA allows to track and monitor the environmental impacts of products and services over the entire life and to recognize the factors of environmental impacts (James W. Levis, 2013). It is a systematic analytical method to identify, evaluate and minimize the environmental impacts of a product through every step of its life from transformation of raw materials into useful products and the final disposal of all products and its by- products (Arun Kumar, 2013). Life cycle assessment can be an entrepreneurial tool for firms to achieve sustainable results through of renewed vision about business management and green innovations (Cassiano Moro Piekarski et al. 2013). LCA is a basis for establishing an environmental policy and is generally used to guide the clean production, development of green production, and the environmental harmonization design (Darko Milanković et al. 2013). II.THE CRADLE-TO-CRADLE SYSTEM William McDonough and Michael Braungart are the key researchers in the field of Cradle-to-Cradle design. William McDonough is an architect, industrial designer, and educator. Michael Braungart is a chemist and an university professor. In 1995 the authors together co-founded McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry, which is a product and process development firm assist the companies for assessment of material, material flows management, and life-cycle design. McDonough and Braungart identified “current human technology is a product of cradle to grave design, we extracts the natural resources from the earth, convert them into a product, use it, and throw it away”. Authors in their book “Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the way we make things” in 2002, proposed an totally different strategy of cradle to cradle design which takes the inspiration from nature and states there is no waste on the earth and Waste = Food. Cradle-to-Cradle is a specific kind of cradle-to-grave assessment, in which recycling or reuse method is employed while disposing the product. Basically, it is a tool to achieve the triple top line growth and eco-effectiveness, aims towards improving the environmental as well as economic values with a large and beneficial ecological footprint. Fig. 1: Cradle-to-Cradle Cycle (Source: McDonough and Braungart, 2002) The Cradle-to-Cradle concept operates on the principle of nature that, ‘there is no waste on the earth’ and ‘Waste=Food’. The waste of one product/process becomes the food for another which is here called as nutrients. From fig. 1 we can see there are two types of nutrients viz. Biological nutrients and Technical Nutrients. Biological nutrients are organic material where the waste becomes the nutrient for another plants to grow while technical nutrients are those, after the end-of-life of a product/service the same material (Secondary material) is used to recreate the products/goods in a closed loop system. From Industrial perspective, this means developing material,