Abstract
The study implements the consequential life cycle assessment (CLCA) to provide a market based perspective on how overall environmental impact will change when shifting glass fibres to flax fibres as reinforcements in composite fabrication. With certain assumptions, the marginal flax fibre supply is identified to be a combination of Chinese flax fibre (70%) and French flax fibre (30%). Due to inferior cultivars and coal-fired electricity in Chinese flax cultivation, the CLCA study reveals that flax mat-PP has 0.8–2 times higher environmental impact values than the glass mat-PP in most environmental impact categories over the production and end-of-life (EoL) phases. For purpose of providing potential trajectories of marginal flax fibre supply, additional scenarios: the “all French fibre”, and “all Chinese fibre” are evaluated formulating the lower and upper boundaries in terms of environmental impact change, respectively. A “the attributional fibre supply mix” scenario is supplied as well. All of these scenarios are useful for policy analysis.
Highlights
Due to global environmental concerns on greenhouse gas emissions and non-renewable resource depletion, there is an apparent trend to promote application of materials from renewable sources to replace conventional materials relying on fossil based fuel energy
A marginal demand for flax mat in composite reinforcement induces a global marginal supply mix of flax fibres from China and France that propagates to Indian jute fibre and Canadian linseed cultivation by system expansion
Another important aspect is that electricity generation in China depends largely on coal, which causes a large burden in most impact categories
Summary
Due to global environmental concerns on greenhouse gas emissions and non-renewable resource depletion, there is an apparent trend to promote application of materials from renewable sources to replace conventional materials relying on fossil based fuel energy. A good example on this paradigm shift is the application of natural fibre replacing glass fibre for fibre reinforced polymer composites (FRPs) production [1]. The natural fibre in this context refers to those plant fibres including flax, hemp, ramie, jute, and coir fibres extracted from agro-products. These plant fibres are thought to embody renewable solar energy. Over 95% of PFRPs produced in the EU are used for automotive components [3] Among these plant fibres, flax fibre is the most widely used plant fibre for composite reinforcement due to its exceptional mechanical properties [3]. Other involved energy carriers, including natural gas, diesel, fuel oil, are sourced from the Ecoinvent database.
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