Systematic approach to carbon footprint and analysis of recycling techniques in the production of PVC pipes

Climate change represents a crucial problem in the contemporary society. The effect of the global warming can be directly measured in the raising of medium global temperature and this impact several environmental aspects as the glaciers melting. In 2015 was edited the Paris agreement, it is a European treaty that want to maintain the medium global temperature below the increasing of 1.5 °C. To reach this goal is important to act promptly on the reduction of greenhouse gas emission. Its already late to act, starting from the industrial period a huge quantity of emission are release in the atmosphere, so the actual situation is problematic and an increasing of medium global temperature of 2 °C is a possible future scenario. So today the attention in the global warming is hight and are needed to find products more eco-friendly. FITT S.P.A. is a European leader in the production of PVC pipes that pay a lot of attention in the sustainability of their product. The work focus in edit a life cycle assessment (LCA) of his products, that is an important methodology to study the environmental impact of a product consider all the life cycle, from raw material to end of life. LCA consist in the collection of all the material and energy flow that are then converted into the correspondent value of several environmental impact categories. This process can also do for more products at the same time using the same series of data and allocation methods, this is called systematic approach and allowed to obtain results for a huge number of products in easier way. To focus on climate change is necessary to concentrate in the impact category of global warming that gives a measured of the emissions in terms of CO2 equivalent. The final results are use both to have a general idea of the environmental impact of a product and to understand which part of the production process is more problematic. The identification of critic stages of the process allowed to concentrate human and economic resources on these phases to enhance the environmental sustainability of a product to make the final product more environmentally friendly. In the case of production of PVC pipes in the company FITT S.P.A the most problematic part is represented by the raw material and end of life stages. Raw material because PVC is a carbon-based polymer so are produced stating from crude oil, and end of life because a huge quantity of plastic waste is generated. To enhance the sustainability of pipes product are study the possibility to exploit the recycling to obtain PVC, that can be used to produced new pipes, starting from PVC waste. In this way, with an efficient recycling method, can be reduced the raw material impact and avoid the used of PVC derived from refining process of crude oil.