Ranking of industrial products

Ranking of Industrial Products

Summary and conclusions

Objectives and principles

In this project all industrial products sold in Denmark have been ranked according to the loss of resources and energy consumption that are connected to these products.

Loss of resources is in this case defined as the amount of material that is not recycled. Loss of renewable materials that are recreated concurrently with their use (e.g. wood) is however not included in the loss of resources.

Energy consumption is in this case defined as:

Energy consumption for producing and manufacturing the materials that make up the industrial product (including their energy content)
plus the energy consumption during use
minus the energy that can be regained by incinerating the loss of resources (including the loss of renewable materials).

The goal of this ranking was to identify the types of industrial products that over their entire life cycle (from extraction of raw materials to the final disposal) can be assumed in particular to have an impact on the environment and therefore should have priority in the further efforts for introducing cleaner technology in Denmark.

The parameters "loss of resources" and "energy consumption" are in this case used as indicator parameters of the total environmental impact that is connected to the industrial products through their life cycle. The choice of these indicator parameters is due to the fact that together they represent an essential part of the total environmental impact of industrial products, and at the same time it is relatively easy to estimate/calculate these parameters for all industrial products.

It is however stressed that these indicator parameters do not take into account the many other types of environmental impact (e.g. emissions from industrial manufacturers) that are connected with industrial products. The very ranking is therefore not a statement of the industrial products that have the greatest environmental impact, but only a statement of the rank according to the chosen indicator parameters.

This project has in principle focused only on actual industrial products, in other words finished goods. Raw materials, semi-manufactures and products made as handicraft are therefore in principle not included in the ranking. Since it is difficult to draw a line between finished goods and semi-manufactures, some semi-manufactures, among these packing materials, are included in this project.

All industrial products sold in Denmark are divided into commodity groups. This was done based on the Commodity Supply Statistics compiled by Statistics Denmark. Of a total of 10,376 item numbers in these supply statistics, 3,729 are considered to be raw materials, semi-manufactures or handicraft - and are therefore sorted out. The remaining 6,647 item numbers are divided into a total of 966 commodity groups (see section 1.2 and appendices 3 and 4).
The material composition is determined for all product groups (see section 1.4 and appendix 5). In other words, the materials that make up the products of a group are identified, and the amount (in %) of each material is estimated. The products are chosen to be described including the packing that they are delivered in and the spare parts and working means that are needed during their life span. For example a washing machine would include soap, softener and water. Here, there is distinguished between the materials specified in table 1.5.
For all materials, the average loss of resources (the amount that is not recycled) is estimated, and it is determined whether the material is renewable, and whether it is recreated at the same rate as its use. The energy needed to extract, produce and manufacture each material is also estimated along with the energy content (the amount of latent energy (see section 1.5 and appendix 6)).
For all commodity groups the energy consumption during use is estimated (total energy consumption in the life span of the products), and it is estimated whether the use and disposal of a product result in a loss of resources for the materials in the commodity group that is different from the average loss of resources (see section 1.5 and appendix 5).
For all commodity groups, figures for production and supply (production + imports - exports) are retrieved from Statistics Denmark. The information is retrieved as average figures for the years 1990 to 1992. In the cases in which this information is confidential, an estimate was made of the probable size of the production/supply (see section 1.3).
Finally a computer system was developed to carry out the calculations of loss of resources, energy consumption and the rank according to these parameters. The fundamentals of the calculations are shown in diagram 1.1, whereas the calculations of each commodity group are found in appendix 2

Results

The result of the ranking is shown in appendices 1a and 1b. Appendix 1a shows the rank as it appears, when the quantity data used in the calculation are an average of the production and supply. Appendix 1b shows the rank, when only the supply data are used in the calculation. It should be noted that there is no essential difference between the two ranks.

That the calculations i.a. are based on the average of production and supply figures, should be regarded as a pragmatic way of solving the problem that certain types of industrial products may have a high impact on the environment in Denmark in the production phase of their life cycle (this is the case for the products for which the export from Denmark is high as compared to the consumption), whereas other products will have an impact mainly in the consumption and disposal phases.

The results show that the industrial products of high ranking are characterized by one or more of the following properties:

The product has an active energy consumption (e.g. a car that uses energy in the form of gasoline)
The product has a large consumption of working means (e.g. a washing machine that uses soap and water)
The product is sold in very large quantities and primarily consists of non-renewable materials (e.g. cement and asphalt)

Also products that primarily consist of renewable materials (e.g. newspapers and magazines that consist of approx. 97% paper and 3% printing ink) can be of high ranking. In this case the products are sold in such large quantities that even a small content of non-renewable materials will give considerable loss of resources.

A considerable number of products among the 50 highest ranked commodity groups are characterized by being connected to the civic sectors of energy, transportation, agriculture and construction.

For the energy sector this regards products such as coal, oil, natural gas, gasoline, kerosene and coke. In this case the products are sold in very large quantities. When these products are ranked high on the list, it is partly because they disappear completely when used, and partly because they have a considerable energy content, which cannot be utilised by the current combustion technology.

In the transportation sector there are products such as ships, automobiles, trucks and trains. These products are characterized by a very large energy consumption during their use, combined with a considerable loss of resources as lubricating oil and other working means, for example tyres on cars.

In the agricultural sector the high-ranked products are primarily fertilizer and feed, but also produce such as meat and cheese. These products are also sold in very large quantities. Although these products (except fertilizer) primarily consist of renewable materials, they do have a small portion of non-renewable packing materials (especially plastic), which is considered to be lost. Aside from this, all of these products represent considerable energy content.

The high-ranked construction products include cement, concrete, asphalt, gypsum, mineral wool, reinforcing iron etc. Again products that are sold in very large quantities and only to a certain degree recycled. For example it should be pointed out that although 70% of all concrete is recycled today, the remaining 30% still represents a very large quantity that inevitably takes up space in dump sites.

Among the 50 highest ranked commodity groups a number of well known household products, such as refrigerators, freezers, washing machines and televisions can also be found - all characterised by a large energy consumption during their use. Washing machines are in addition characterised by a large consumption of working means, such as soap, softener etc. Measured over the life span of a washing machine the soap consumption constitutes 86% of the total material weight excluding water. Also a number of consumer goods are high-ranked, for example newspapers, magazines and bottled beer, all of which are sold in very large quantities. The same is the case for furniture made of chip boards or wood fibre boards, which are also high-ranked.

It should be noted that the ranking carried out here does not take the social utility value of the industrial products into consideration. A product that is ranked high on the list is not necessarily a poor or environmentally harmful product. A number of these products (e.g. refrigerators and televisions) are on the contrary products in connection with which Danish companies have initiated efforts for introducing cleaner technology, thereby developing environmentally safer products. When a product is high-ranked, it should be taken as documentation of a very large loss of resources and/or energy consumption connected with that product, and therefore it can be in the interest of the public to initiate considerations as to the improvements/changes/consumption reductions etc. that might be introduced for that product. A number of these products are sold in such large quantities that even a relatively small improvement would have great influence compared to many of the lower ranked products.

It is emphasized that during the final evaluation of the results brought forward in this project, it is of course necessary to observe that the ranking does not take all the environmental impacts connected to the industrial products into consideration. In other words, when finding the final priority of the products it would be relevant to include knowledge about emissions of chemical substances during manufacturing processes in Denmark, and at the same time take the industrial products that contain especially environmentally hazardous materials into consideration.

In this way industrial products that are only sold in very small quantities, and therefore are ranked very low on the list, can demand attention due to a content of environmentally hazardous materials or pollution during manufacturing.

Uncertainties

Aside from this, it is emphasized that the ranking naturally contains elements of uncertainty, since all the data that go into the calculations can only be determined within a certain degree. In some cases errors were made at estimating the material composition, material data etc. As is noted in section 2.2 it is estimated that the loss of resources calculations should be considered to have a degree of uncertainty that typically ranges from -42% to +61%, whereas the calculations of energy consumption range from -50% to +76%.

These uncertainties indicate that it makes no sense to claim that the commodity group ranked as number 30 has a greater environmental impact than the commodity group ranked as number 35, or to single out number 250 instead of number 300. It does however make sense to emphasize commodity groups ranked 1 - 50 instead of numbers 100 - 200 and so on. In other words it is the greater perspectives that should be noticed.

Data base

Apart from the ranking, which was the primary goal of this project, the project also fulfilled the goal of providing essential knowledge of industrial products and the materials used in these. This knowledge is as described in section 3.2 expected to be of use in connection with material flow analyses and other environmental studies concerning industrial products. All the data that were retrieved through this project along with the documentation of this data were organised in a data base installed in the computer system of the Danish Environmental Protection Agency (Miljøstyrelsen). Although this data base is today only equipped to carry out the calculations that were necessary in connection with this project, the data base could relatively easily be extended to carry out a number of other calculations. This project can therefore be said to have laid the cornerstone for a data base on industrial products and materials, which will hopefully be of great value in the future environmental work in Denmark.

It is emphasized that the extent and time limit of this project naturally resulted in a data base that is far from perfect and in many ways is improvable. The data found in this data base should therefore not be considered the ultimate truth, but rather a basis that can be useful for making overall estimates, and which can be improved, as more precise data are made available.