1. Life cycle environmental impacts of vacuum cleaners and the effects of European regulation
- Author
-
Gallego-Schmid, Alejandro, Mendoza, Joan Manuel F., Jeswani, Harish Kumar, and Azapagic, Adisa
- Subjects
Eco-design ,Energy efficiency ,Environmental Engineering ,Environmental Chemistry ,Life cycle assessment (LCA) ,Electricity decarbonisation ,Waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE) ,Waste Management and Disposal ,Pollution - Abstract
Energy efficiency of vacuum cleaners has been declining over the past decades while at the same time their number in Europe has been increasing. The European Commission has recently adopted an eco-design regulation to improve the environmental performance of vacuum cleaners. In addition to the existing directive on waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE), the regulation could potentially have significant effects on the environmental performance of vacuum cleaners. However, the scale of the effects is currently unknown, beyond scant information on greenhouse gas emissions. Thus, this paper considers for the first time life cycle environmental impacts of vacuum cleaners and the effects of the implementation of these regulations at the European level. The effects of electricity decarbonisation, product lifetime and end-of-life disposal options are also considered. The results suggest that the implementation of the eco-design regulation alone will reduce significantly the impacts from vacuum cleaners (37%–44%) by 2020 compared with current situation. If business as usual continued and the regulation was not implemented, the impacts would be 82%–109% higher by 2020 compared to the impacts with the implementation of the regulation. Improvements associated with the implementation of the WEEE directive will be much smaller (
- Published
- 2016