Life Cycle Environmental and Cost Assessments Incorporating Lifetime Prediction of High Density Polyethylene and Alternatives in Drainage Applications

Abstract

The production supply chain of high density polyethylene (HDPE) and portland cement uses and consumes vast quantities of fossil energy (mainly petroleum) used for their extraction and production. Those consumed resources emit large volumes of greenhouse gases (GHG) to the atmosphere. In the past decade, HDPE has become a widely used polymeric engineering material that has been adopted in different industries, including in the construction of landfill liners, power and telecom cable conduits, sewage and drainage pipes, and automotive fuel tanks. Unlike HDPE, portland cement has been commonly used for centuries and it became the standard for many research on construction materials. This dissertation is going to investigate the life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle cost (LCC) of pristine HDPE, ordinary portland cement and its various alternative materials such as post-consumer recycled plastics, nanocomposite and bio-based plastics, non-portland cement based cementitious binders, which could be economically beneficial since they either use obsolete resources or engage the renewable resources. In other words, they could potentially consume less energy to process compared to its conventional counterparts, and may also have lower production costs. A thorough LCA study needs to account for the presence of uncertainty and risk. There is no doubt that these factors heavily impact the decision-making process. For this reason, this dissertation employs the resampling and stochastic methods to quantify the data uncertainty of input parameters with the hope that the analysis would generate more precise results. By incorporating the uncertainty characterization and a standard by ASTM with the LCA and LCC, this dissertation hopes to deliver a meaningful life cycle environmental and cost analysis to the industrial decision-makers and investors.%%%%Ph.D., Civil Engineering – Drexel University, 2017