Life Cycle Assessment of Sanitary Ware: Quantifying Environmental Impact

Abstract

Reducing environmental impacts is a key challenge for the sanitary ware industry, which needs to effectively balance economic performance with environmental sustainability. In this study, life cycle assessment (LCA) was applied to quantify the environmental impacts associated with sanitary ware production in China. A Monte Carlo uncertainty analysis was further conducted to evaluate the uncertainty of the LCA results under the assumption that the inventory data followed normal distributions. The results show that the product manufacturing stage is the dominant contributor to the overall environmental impact, accounting for 79.90%. At this stage, human carcinogenic toxicity, freshwater ecotoxicity, marine ecotoxicity, freshwater eutrophication, ozone formation impacts on terrestrial ecosystems, and ozone formation impacts on human health are mainly attributable to electricity consumption. In contrast, fossil resource scarcity, terrestrial ecotoxicity, and global warming are primarily associated with the combined consumption of electricity and natural gas. The Monte Carlo simulation results show that the coefficient of variation of greenhouse gas emissions is below 10%, indicating a relatively low level of uncertainty. The uncertainty is mainly attributed to differences between domestic and international production conditions, as well as the limited accuracy of raw material transport distance data. Future research should focus on establishing regional background databases for raw materials and developing data quality standards for activity data, thereby further improving the reliability of environmental impact accounting for sanitary ware.