Life Cycle Assessment of Painting Process: A Case for Eco-friendly Automobile Production

The life cycle assessment (LCA) method was introduced and applied to automotive painting process, SimaPro 9.5 software with the Swiss Ecoinvent 3 Database and the United States Life Cycle Inventory Database (USLCI), as well as ReCiPe 2016 Midpoint (H) model were used to quantitatively evaluate the impact on ecological environment of the use of materials, resources and energy as well as generated emissions and wastes through four important midpoint impact categories: climate change, ecotoxicity, human toxicity, and fossil resource scarcity, to track important environmental footprints including carbon footprint during the whole production activities of automotive painting process. In the end, the results and sensitivity analysis of the LCA research were conducted, conclusions and recommendations were given, which provided a practical industrial case for eco-friendly automobile production. Results of this study show that within the automotive painting production process, energy consumption and its resulting emissions have more significant impacts on climate change, fossil resource scarcity and human toxicity; Material consumption and its resultant emissions and wastes have a notable impact on ecotoxicity. Among the main processes and units of automotive painting production, the topcoat process has the most significant impact on all four impact categories, utility power as well as pre-treatment and electrophoresis processes follow closely. Additionally, the sealant application process exhibits a relatively significant impact on ecotoxicity. Furthermore, if the electricity used in the automotive painting production process is entirely sourced from photovoltaic power generation, compared with traditional grid power supply, the impacts on climate change, fossil resource scarcity and human toxicity would be lower, whereas the impact on ecotoxicity would be more significant.