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Published in:
01-07-2015 | LIFE CYCLE MANAGEMENT
Investigation of green practices for paper use reduction onboard a cruise ship—a life cycle approach
Published in: The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment | Issue 7/2015
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Abstract
Purpose
The aim of this paper is to analyse the potential green practices that can be adopted onboard a cruise ship in order to enhance the environmental performance of the cruise with particular attention to paper input and output flows in a waste minimization perspective.
Methods
A comparative life cycle assessment (LCA) of management scenarios of paper streams onboard a cruise ship is performed. The potential environmental impacts due to three strategic choices about paper and paper waste management onboard a case-study ship have been investigated through a so-called difference analysis, i.e. the digitalization of the daily information journal Today, the reduction of toilet paper and paper towels through the installation of auto-cut single extraction dispensers and the reduction of printing paper through dissemination of specific guidelines. In order to compare each scenario with the reference case in absence of the practice implementation, the functional unit in this study has been defined as 1 day of cruise.
Results and discussion
The implementation of the analysed green practices show comparable environmental benefits onboard a pilot ship, on the basis the set of assumptions and hypothesis identified in this simulation. In particular, when comparing the potential GHG emission reductions, it results that the two most realistically feasible scenarios in the communication area, i.e. digitalization of 25 and 50 % shares of Today journal, show environmental savings comparable to measures related to reduction of consumables and guidelines for personnel. Nevertheless, the addition of a reasonable number of touch-screen devices for this purpose would not significantly influence the environmental impacts.
Conclusions
A set of reduction measures of paper items onboard a cruise ship is able to both avoid the impacts related to production and incineration stages. In the form of forecast scenarios, the results of such modelization may represent a set of indicators to be considered in a feasibility analysis prior to selection of the green practices to be introduced, as a support to decisions for cruise managers.