Life Cycle Impact Assessment and Economic Evaluation of Material Cutting Technologies

Abstract

All industries create a certain amount of waste and burden to the environment for manufacturing. As sustainability has gained prominence lately, reducing the environmental impacts in manufacturing has become a must. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a common method to measure the environmental effects of a manufacturing operation. Material cutting is a manufacturing procedure to obtain the final substance ready to be used regarding its shape and size and is widely used in several industry lines. Certain technologies conduct the cutting process, such as WaterJet and Laser. Evaluating material cutting methods for their environmental outputs is also necessary with the rising awareness of environmentally friendly technologies. Thus, WaterJet and Laser cutting technologies are compared within the scope of LCA in this work. In addition to the LCA, economic evaluation is required to overcome heterogeneities among different industries that use the same technology. Thus, the two technologies are also evaluated regarding their operating costs. To the best of our knowledge, no work compares these two technologies from these perspectives before. Our results showed that the replacement of WaterJet by Laser could lessen the cost of material cutting both environmentally and economically.