'LCA to go' - Environmental assessment of machine tools according to requirements of Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) - development of the methodological concept

摘要

The goal of the "LCA to go" project is spreading the use of LCA across European SMEs. For the sector of machine tools a webtool will be developed to help SMEs with conducting environmental assessment. First the SMEs requirements regarding environmental assessment were gathered in a survey. Second LCA case studies and third standards and legislation were studied. Out of these three sources a simplified environmental assessment methodology is developed. This resulted in a two-step approach including the life cycle phase raw materials and use phase of the machine tool. In the first step of the methodology the Cumulative Energy Demand have to be calculated to analyse the environmental hot spots. Depending on the hot spots a detailed environmental assessement using the CED or an Energy Efficiency Index is proposed in the second step. The methodology should be kept simple but lead to useful data for environmental communication. Next steps in the project are the detailed specification of the methodolgy, the data collection and the tool development.