Benchmarking environmental performance of electric insulator supply chain in India using life cycle assessment

This study aims at finding the environmental impacts generated by an electric disk insulator supply chain, used for the distribution of electricity by an open wire system, through a case study. This study also aims at benchmarking the environmental impacts of an electric insulator manufacturing process by taking ideal condition of zero waste as reference.

Cradle-to-grave life cycle assessment (LCA) has been carried out by following the guidelines provided in ISO 14040 series standards and using Umberto NXT software. ReCiPe endpoint and ReCiPe midpoint impact assessment methodologies have been used to calculate environmental impacts under various categories. The primary data has been collected from a medium-scale manufacturer of electric disk insulators located at Bikaner in north-west India. The secondary data has been taken from ecoinvent 3.0 database and literature. The environmental impacts using endpoint assessment (ecosystem quality, human health, and resources) and midpoint assessment (climate change, fossil depletion, human toxicity, metal depletion, ozone depletion, terrestrial acidification, and water depletion) categories have been computed. Finally, the results are compared and benchmarked against the ideal zero waste condition using three different production scenarios. The limitation of this study is that the data has been collected only from one manufacturer and its supply chain.

It has been found that the use of steel, electricity, and fuel; transportation of product; and disposal of water generate high environmental impacts in the supply chain. It has also been found that in the electric disk insulator supply chain, the raw material extraction phase has the highest environmental impacts followed by manufacturing, disposal, transportation, and installation phases. This study has also found that benchmark scenario “B” (zero waste condition) is environmentally more efficient in comparison to scenario “A” (actual recycling condition) and scenario “C” (maximum waste condition).

This study has identified that raw materials, resources, and processes in the supply chain of an electric disk insulator manufacturing unit are responsible for the environmental damage. The various manufacturing processes and installation of the electric disk insulators are similar for all manufacturers except the machinery efficiency and the generated waste. This study provides environmental impacts associated with an electric disk insulator manufacturing process under zero waste or ideal conditions (scenario B). These results are used as a benchmark to compare environmental performance of electric disk insulator supply chain operating under actual conditions.