Abstract
Bio-derived fibres and resins are of increasing interest as alternatives to petrochemicals in the production of so-called environmentally friendly composite materials. However, whilst the majority of systems consider complete replacement, another route is to look at the constituents that are required to give certain properties, including the content of diluents; a third is to identify ‘hot spots’ in manufacturing. This paper considers these three possibilities in the context of the production of a resin system, and presents results from a life cycle assessment. The aim of this study was to make qualitative assertions based on quantitative estimates. The current work provides a practical assessment of the contribution of the manufacturing process of a multi-part resin formulation to a range of environmental impacts. As a part of this, a multi-stage methodology, the first of its kind, which is more relevant for the batch processes used to manufacture many structural thermosetting polymer systems, was developed. This was applied to a range of resins, some of which include bio-mass derived precursors. For the boundary conditions used, the indications are that the impacts due to taking the constituents and processing them to produce the resin system are insignificant compared with those due to producing the feedstocks in the first place. Surprisingly, whether the feedstocks were from fossil resources or were bioderived was of little significance. As a consequence of the analysis, it has been demonstrated that whilst a manufacturer can make significant savings through careful management of plant and the supporting energy mix, significant improvements to the environmental impacts of resin systems can be made through the choice of particular monomers.
Highlights
It must be remembered that sustainability is a property of the system and not of the material [7]. This is relevant in the context of composite materials where the system consists of a plethora of raw materials, but the materials produced can be handled in a number of different ways and used in myriad applications in a number of sectors including aerospace, automotive, construction and marine, seeing a range of service conditions before end-of-life disposal by a number of different routes
A breakdown of the contribution from the materials as supplied and the on-site process is presented in Figure 2 and from this it can be seen that the on-site processes add comparatively litStulestationatbhilietye2n01v9i,r1o1n, xmFeOnRtPaElEiRmRpEaVcItEWof the raw materials
It has been shown that the majority of the human toxicity environmental impact of the resin system was attributed to a monomer that was less than 2.5% of the formulation
Summary
It must be remembered that sustainability is a property of the system and not of the material [7]. This is relevant in the context of composite materials where the system consists of a plethora of raw materials, but the materials produced can be handled in a number of different ways (wet lay-up, pre-preg, etc.) and used in myriad applications in a number of sectors including aerospace, automotive, construction and marine, seeing a range of service conditions before end-of-life disposal by a number of different routes. Disposal in particular represents a significant issue as the intimate combination of two or more separate materials makes higher level actions within the waste hierarchy [8] difficult if not impossible
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