End-of-life of a polypropylene bumper skin

The aim of this article is to show how, at PSA peugeot-citroën, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is used as a tool to evaluate the environmental burdens associated with a product, a process or an activity by identifying and quantifying energy, material used and wastes released to the environment. In this paper, the LCA methodology is applied to a practical case study: the comparison of various end-of-life scenarios (recycling versus incineration with or without energy recovery with landfill as a reference) for a polypropylene (PP) bumper skin. All the LCA steps (goal, inventory, impacts assessment, interpretation) are developed in this study. It is shown that in the particular case of PP, incineration with energy recovery is on an environmental point of view between 30 and 60% recycling. However, due to some uncertainties on data quality, the absolute values of the inputs/outputs for the inventory step may not be sufficient to allow strong decision making and the use of the factorial experiments (Taguchi) is then proposed to select the dominant parameters of the study. Strong environmental conclusions can then be drawn from the study.