Product life cycle distribution

There is a trend in Europe and East Asia toward product life cycle responsibility legislation that requires manufacturers to minimize environmental impacts from materieils extraction to manufacturing to distribution/packaging to repair to recycling to disposal. Essentitilly, extended product responsibility shifts the pollution prevention focus from production facilities to the entire product fife cycle (Davis et al. 1997). For example, proposed legislation may require that memufacturers not only recycle in-plant wastes but also recycle their discarded products (Denmark Ministry of the Environment 1992 Davis 1997). The evaluation of life cycle stages and impacts are discussed further in Section 4.3. 

Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is a three-step design evaluation methodology composed of inventory profile, environmental impact assessment, and improvement analysis (Keoleian and Menerey 1994). The purpose of the inventory step is to examine the resources consumed and wastes generated at all stages of the product life cycle, including raw materials acquisition, manufacturing, distribution, use, repair, reclamation, and waste disposal. 

Before examining the approaches to recycling textiles, it is important to place this discussion in the context of the product life cycle. The methodology of LCA is one approach to quantitatively assess the environmental advantages of recycling fibre. An LCA typically considers the energy, water and chemical impacts of a product system from cradle (raw materials) through to production, distribution, use by the consumer and disposal. Formal LCA follows ISO 14040 and ISO 14044 standards. It requires determination of the functional unit of the product or raw material in question to be assessed, for example T kg of cotton fibre , or one viscose blouse . Importantly, LCA is conducted under defined system boundaries. For example, the LCA may be... 

The challenge regarding the further processing and the usage during the prospective product life cycle is the quantitative risk and reliability estimation, which is primarily caused by the small prototype test data in combination with the heterogeneous distributions of the fibre and treatment characteristics. 

Product life cycle assessment involves consideration of environmental effects at every stage in the product s life cycle, including the natural resources and energy consumed and the waste created in the manufacture, distribution and disposal of a product and its packaging...Such assessments will only provide useful comparative information about how to reduce environmental problems associated with products if they are conducted using uniform and consistent assumptions ... 

Another problem of EGAs is that they are non-site-specific. The reasons for this lie in the fact that they include the whole life cycle of systems with resources which may originate in different countries and waste products and emissions which may distribute globally. They deal with factual inputs, outputs and the environmental impact potentials of the system under investigation on a global, and, in some cases, regional scale. Yet, they do not address the intrinsic risks resulting from the system itself. However, a combination with risk assessment methods can be used to close this gap. 

So, after 6 years of debate, TSCA was born. This was an important six years. Many of the environmental laws of our country were enacted during the 1960 s and early 70 s. TSCA was to be the "cap" on all of the laws - filling all the gaps that existed between the previous laws. It was also designed to put in place, a law to regulate all chemicals in commerce which may present an unreasonable risk in any part of the chemical s life cycle. Any part of the life cycle can be regulated from R D through production, distribution and disposal. 

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