A method for determining the environmental footprint of industrial products using simulation

Effective assessment and communication of the environmental footprint is increasingly important to process development and marketing purposes. Traditionally, static methods have been applied to analyze the environmental impact during a product's life cycle; however, they are unable to incorporate dynamic aspects of real world operations. This paper discusses a method using Discrete Event Simulation (DES) to analyze production systems and simultaneously enable labeling of products' environmental footprint. The method steps include data management, determination of environmental footprint, and communication of the results. The method is developed during a case study of a job-shop-production facility. To evaluate the DES method, the DES results were compared with the results of a Simplified Life Cycle Assessment (SLCA) conducted on the same production system. The case study demonstrates the possibility for the DES method to determine the variation between products in terms of the environmental footprint and highlights some of the difficulties involved.