Question

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a tool to evaluate and quantify the impacts of a product to the environment. Watch the “Prius Life Cycle” video on Youtube. From the video and your understanding the concept of LCA, describe how the evaluation of LCA is carried out for a Prius car, which is a product from the Toyota company, Japan.

Answer 1

LCA (Life Cycle Assessment) is the impact on environment by a product in throughout it's life cycle.It can be more clearly understood by the example, if we talk about the Life Cycle of a car then it will involve it's all stages of life from cradle to grave .In between cradle and grave the steps are Extraction of raw material➡️Processing➡️Manufacturing ➡️Distribution ➡️Use (Driving)➡️Disposal ,and in this way LCA evaluate the type of material processed in the production chain and contribution towards in global warming and ozon layer dipletion.Thus LCA is an effective tool for decision making to improve the environmental performance of a product.

Now we can understood the Life Cycle Assessment of Prius Car.Prius car is the product of a Japanese Company,Toyota.The Life Cycle of automobiles catalyse the environmental pollution by the green house gases emission but Toyoto has committed to reduce the Corbin emission thats why launched Prius car ,which is congenial to environment.Design ,Production ,driving and recycling of a Prius car assessing to air quality improvement.Tsutsumi plant is the responsible for the material production of the Prius car in Japan which use more than 50% electricity from solar panel and remaining from the gas plant.And thus the plant has reduced it's Corbon emission by almost 50% at the point of time of material production.In this plant ,there is comprehensive water recycling program lead to reduction in water discharge along with clean water discharge,And discharge water is more cleaner to the river .The plat is painted with the photocatalytic paint which help in ,to clean air .And the plant has huge greenery on its surrounding because it has planted more than 50000 plant till before 2010.The third generation of Panasonic batteries has the less size with high performance are used in the Prius Car.And the plastic used are ecological plastic to made the body of Car ,and final marketable product of this type plastic require less Corbon emission, as usual.Now coming to the driving point,the Prius Car is designed with the Eco Mode option while driving and when this is on it reduce the corbon emission by 20% .Now coming to the last point that is recycling,the Prius car is having 6kg of plastic and almost 90 % materials are recyclable and remaining are recoverable.This is all about the Life Cycle of Prius car with the important point.

The above mentioned factor are point of Attention for Life Cycle Assessment of Prius Car and from the above explanation it can also be concluded that Prius Car will impact less, to environment in negative way.So that LCA of Prius car gives indication of positive sign in accordance with the environmental protection.