II. Environmental impacts of road transportation

Sustainable development is a kind of development where the pace of technical development, the satiation of increasing supply and the raw materials and resources of the Earth are poised so that the rate of living and the opportunities of the future generations should not decline. For this reason, transportation systems must be developed and the effectiveness of transportation service must be increased while environmental pollution must be decreased or prevented. Vehicles are burning fuels inefficiently. There are two options of decreasing environmental impacts – one is to reduce fuel consumption while another is to do it in a more acceptable way increasing efficiency. There is justifiable demand put forward by the society to moderate environmental impacts caused by road transportation. This article deals with modelling the energetic utilisation of exhaust gas.

Download Full-text

Life Cycle Assessment of Cross-Laminated Timber Transportation from Three Origin Points

Sustainability ◽

10.3390/su14010336 ◽

2021 ◽

Vol 14 (1) ◽

pp. 336

Author(s):

Mahboobeh Hemmati ◽

Tahar Messadi ◽

Hongmei Gu

Keyword(s):

Life Cycle Assessment ◽

Life Cycle ◽

Environmental Impacts ◽

Real Data ◽

Transportation Systems ◽

Impact Factors ◽

University Of Arkansas ◽

Road Transportation ◽

Cross Laminated Timber ◽

The University

Cross-laminated timber (CLT) used in the U.S. is mainly imported from abroad. In the existing literature, however, there are data on domestic transportation, but little understanding exists about the environmental impacts from the CLT import. Most studies use travel distances to the site based on domestic supply origins. The new Adohi Hall building at the University of Arkansas campus, Fayetteville, AR, presents the opportunity to address the multimodal transportation with overseas origin, and to use real data gathered from transporters and manufacturers. The comparison targets the environmental impacts of CLT from an overseas transportation route (Austria-Fayetteville, AR) to two other local transportation lines. The global warming potential (GWP) impact, from various transportation systems, constitutes the assessment metric. The findings demonstrate that transportation by water results in the least greenhouse gas (GHG) emission compared with freight transportation by rail and road. Transportation by rail is the second most efficient, and by road the least environmentally efficient. On the other hand, the comparison of the life cycle assessment (LCA) tools, SimaPro (Ecoinvent database) and Tally (GaBi database), used in this research, indicate a remarkable difference in GWP characterization impact factors per tonne.km (tkm), primarily due to the different database used by each software.

Download Full-text

Integration of Land Use Aspects into Life Cycle Assessment at the Example of Biofuels

MRS Proceedings ◽

10.1557/proc-1041-r05-02 ◽

2007 ◽

Vol 1041 ◽

Author(s):

Michael Held ◽

Ulrike Bos

Keyword(s):

Land Use ◽

Life Cycle Assessment ◽

Life Cycle ◽

Crude Oil ◽

Environmental Impacts ◽

Renewable Resources ◽

Alternative Fuels ◽

Transport Systems ◽

Transport Sector ◽

Road Transportation

AbstractIt is well known that the transport sector causes significant environmental impacts worldwide and as a consequence influences the results of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) studies. Today's fuels are dominated by crude oil derived fuels. In Europe currently 98 % of the road transportation is based on such crude oil derived fuels. Similar ratios can be observed e.g. in the US and other countries. In addition to the environmental impacts, the high dependency on the imports of fossil fuels motivates most European countries to investigate in other than fossil fuel based transport systems. Therefore the European Commission presented an action plan including a strategy with the objective to substitute 20% of crude oil derived fuels by alternative fuel until 2020. To achieve these goals, actions to reduce the import dependency of fuels, the usage of non renewable (fossil) resources and the environmental burdens connected to the use of fuel / propulsion systems have to be addressed. Besides, the energy carrier mix has to be broadened. Especially alternative fuels from renewable resources, BtL (Biomass to Liquid) are supposed to have a high potential.Recent developments show, that there is a variety of options for fuels available as well as for propulsion technologies that utilize fuels based on renewable resources. It is therefore of key importance to select and promote the fuel/ propulsion system technology which is most beneficiary for a country or region from an environmental but also from an economic and social perspective. For such a sustainability evaluation it is essential to consider the local/regional boundary conditions such as availability of fuel resources, major pollution issues which need to be addressed, supply of secondary energy (e.g. power) etc. LCA is therefore a suitable approach to evaluate and compare different options, due to its transparent consideration of all life cycle stages.Besides the environmental impacts and resource consumption which are addressed in LCA considerations the needed land is another important aspect when talking about biomass as a resource. As land is a scarce resource that is used for all industry sectors there is a need to address this issue also in LCA. Up to now, no commonly agreed upon methods exist which allow the integration of land use aspects in a consistent way into LCA Software and Database. Currently at LBP-GaBi, University of Stuttgart together with PE International, a method is developed to integrate land use aspects into LCA. Backward processes are now implemented in an applicable way into a LCA database system.This Paper describes the main approach of the developed methodology for land use consideration within LCA.

Download Full-text

Life Cycle Assessment of SOFCs-Based Auxiliary Power Unit in China

Volume 4: 23rd Design for Manufacturing and the Life Cycle Conference; 12th International Conference on Micro- and Nanosystems ◽

10.1115/detc2018-85527 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

An Wen ◽

Jing Tao ◽

Suiran Yu

Keyword(s):

Life Cycle ◽

Solid Oxide Fuel Cells ◽

Environmental Impacts ◽

Power Unit ◽

Environmental Benefits ◽

Heavy Vehicles ◽

Road Transportation ◽

Fuel Production ◽

Auxiliary Power Unit ◽

Auxiliary Power

Reducing energy consumption and environmental pollution of road transportation is one of the major challenges to China’s commitment to sustainable development. This paper aims to establish the LCA model of solid oxide fuel cells-based auxiliary power unit (SOFC-APU) for heavy vehicles with Chinese background for analysis of potential environmental benefits of its implementation in China. First, the LCA of the SOFC power using natural gas as the cells’ fuel is performed using eBalance, which is the Chinese LCA software with high quality domestic underlying database, and the results show that the fuel production phase is a major contributor to SOFC-APU’s life-cycle environmental impacts. Then the comparative LCA analysis of SOFC-APU using biomass ethanol from different feedstock planting areas in China is presented and results show that using corn-based ethanol fuel can potentially lower the lifecycle environmental impacts of SOFC-APU by 37.7%.

Download Full-text