Livscyklusvurdering og produktorienteret miljøledelse hos
Gabriel A/S

1. Summary

Objective

The objective of the project, "life cycle in sale, design and product development", partly has been to collect life cycle oriented data for the most important processes and raw materials, which are used for the manufacturing of padding textiles at Gabriel AS. As well as to use the collected data as the basis for individual life cycle assessments and the development of specific environmental declaration of contents for Gabriel’s textiles. The objective also has been to implement the preparation of life cycle assessments and environmental declarations in Gabriel’s existing environmental and quality management system in order to make the environmental management system product oriented.

Method

The method to reach the objective has been to create LCA-based "bricks", that can be used to model a certain product on the basis of Gabriels parts lists. Which raw materials and processes these "bricks" are prepared for, are therefore based on what are estimated to be the most important products of Gabriel generally and consequently not specifically for a particular textile.

The methods used to create the LCA-based "bricks" have been based on the so-called UMIP-method. The life cycle assessments are prepared based on the international standard for life cycle assessments, ISO 14040.

The method, used to create a product oriented environmental management system has been based on the requirements of ISO 14040, as well as an examination of which parts of Gabrielīs existing system of Gabriel that need to be trimmed in order to enable Gabirel to continue to work product oreinted through environmnetal management. An important element in this phase was to involve Gabriel's board of directors and to give them ownership of changes in the system.

Data collection

Collection of data at Gabriel, in Aalborg and in Falster started with the total environmental impact of water consumption, waste water, energy consumption, waste, etc.

The environmental impacts of the company were then divided into the 14 selected processes. After the first separation of environmentalimpacts, a "rest environmental impact" remained. The remainder was distributed among the processes according to the part that the individual process represented of the environmental influences.The collection of data in connection with raw materials started with the preparation of questionaires for the suppliers. The questionaires dealt with the environmental impacts of the production of raw material. TheseThe enquiries received a positive response as well as realtivly detailed environmental data from approximately 1/3 of the aasked suppliers. Especially good data came from a supplier in New Zealand dealing with processes from sheep farming to shipment of washed raw-wool. The excellent quality of the data from the supplier in New Zealand firstly is the result of the close cooperation between Gabriel and their supplier. Secondly, one of the employees at the New Zealand supplier previously had worked with detailed surveys of environmental impacts.The very fact that the supplier previously had worked with LCAs was the most important reason for the excellent, detailed data that was received. One supplier, however, exceeded all others: They submitted complete LCAs made on the basis of ISO 14040 for 6 surface active materials and one dye.

However, many of the suppliers had no data detailed enough to assess specific environmental impacts of production of the specific raw materials. In order to accomodate these suppliers, a specification of the total environmental impacts of the production processes of the different suppliers was called for instead. Subsequently, the supplier was asked to specify the percentage that a given raw materialmade up of the environmental impacts of the company's entire production.

The degree of detail of the collected data therefore varied greatly. Thus, it was necessary to calculate the uncertainty of the final resultsas well as carry out sensitivity analysis.

UMIP PC-tool

Data treatment was carried out in connection with data collection. One of the objectives of the project was, as mentioned above, tto carry out the data analysis using UMIP.

Generally, UMIP contains only a few effect factors for humantoxicology and ecotoxicology andalmost no factors in connection with complex industrial chemicals. According to UMIP, screening of chemicals at Gabriel for possible toxicological effects resulted in 19 chemicals classified as: "should be examined more closely". Therefore, it seemed unreasonable to diesregard humantox and ecotox contributions from the materials used in Gabriel’s production.Thus, a great deal of ressources were set aside in the project to find an approximate method for characterizing the environmental impact of these chemicals. However, the final conclusionwas that it was impossible to define the effect factors for the chemicals within the limits of this project.

Consequently, only a few of those chemicals emitted by Gabriel or Gabriel's suppliers, have effect factors included in UMIP. Therefore, only these few chemicals are singled out in the UMIP transcripts dealing with the potential impact of the different textiles.

This is a considerable shortcoming in relation to the life cycle assessment of the various textiles of Gabriel.

Life cycle assessment

The method of life cycle assessment was tested on 3 textiles (one in pure wool, one in pure polyester and one in a mix of wool and polyamide (90/10), 3 typical scenarios of use (cleaning with perchlorine, vacuum cleaning and spot cleaning) and a destruction scenario (combustion), and, finally, 2 alternative dye processes. For these products and processes, the 3 most important potential environmental impacts, health and safety concerns and consumption of resources were singled out.

Environmental declaration of contents

Based on the results of the LCAs for the 3 textiles, the conclusion is that using these results for marketing with environmental declarations is not recommendable. Thus, the project objective of preparing specific environmental declarations for all of Gabriel’s textiles could not be realised.

There are 3 reasons for this:

• Discrepancies in the objective,
• data uncertainty and lack of data,
• lack of effect factors.

System construction

The first project activity, implementation of life cycle assessments and environmental declarations in the environmental management system, was to make an action plan for the audit.

The first suggestions for changes in Gabriel's quality and environmental management system were an important element of the action plan. The changes needed to be carried out in order to document the work in relation to product oriented environmental management, and at the same time live up to the requirements of ISO 14040.

The work with the system requires support from and ownership by the board of directors as well as allocation of resources. Therefore, it was important to introduce the project to Gabriel’s management at a meeting at the beginning and at the end of the project.

Gradually, as phase 1 moved into data analysis using UMIP, and the application of LCA results, the work group was given an imnpression of the complexity of carrying out and maintaining an LCA. Consequently, in the middle of phase 2, the objective of the procedure for environmental impact assessment of products was changed. Firstly, this was due to the fact that maintaining and carrying out LCAs creates great demands on the qualifications and ressources of Gabriel's employees. Secondly, Gabriel decided on a general strategy of focusing on the company's core services and outsourcing periphery services.

All other changes in documents remained as proposals at the end of the project, waiting for further quality security and approval by the quality control group at Gabriel AS. As a result, no real implementation and audit of the product oriented environmental management system has been carried out. However, it can be concluded that only minor new system elements are need for revision of an existing process oriented environmental management system to a product oriented system.