Environmental Impact Comparison of Some Cast Metals Using Lca Approach : A Step Towards Sustainable Manufacturing

Due to increasing environmental awareness, industries and businesses have started emphasizing on making "greener" products and using "greener" processes. LCA is one such tool for evaluating environmental performance of products and processes. Cast products are considered to be resource intensive and emitting gaseous, liquid and solid wastes. In this study, we evaluated and compared lifecycle environmental impact of some ferrous and non ferrous sand castings using LCA approach. This book commences with a brief introduction of sand casting and LCA and presents the goal, system boundaries, input specifications, inventory classification, characterization and impact assessment. Result shows that for an automotive casting steel is most and aluminium is least harmful for environment for all impact categories except the resource category. During manufacturing phase melting furnaces, binder systems, casting yield, sand to metal ratio play very important role in minimizing negative environmental impacts. As for automotive casting is concerned, use phase dominates all other lifecycle phases and has most potential for minimizing negative impact on environment.