Life Cycle Assessment of Autoliv’s Front Seatbelt

Abstract: Autoliv as a world leading enterprise in automotive safety has determined four Life CycleAssessment (LCA) study for its main products including airbag, seatbelt, Electronic ControlUnit (ECU) and Night Vision Camera to improve its knowledge about these products andtheir supply chain. This particular LCA study has been carried out for Autoliv’s pyrotechnicfront seatbelt.In this study the whole life cycle is considered; starting from extraction and production of rawmaterials, manufacturing of components at suppliers plants, seatbelt assembly at Autoliv plantin Hungary, installation in Audi Ingolstadt, use phase in the cars and finally seatbelt’s end oflife when it is shredded together with the car.The results of the study indicate that over the course of the life cycle of the seatbelt, the usephase has the largest potential to cause global warming (total 41 kg), acidification (total 75 g),eutrophication (total 8.72 g) and air ecotoxicity (total 90 kg). This is mainly due to highamount of CO2 and variety of other toxic substances that are released during combustion offuel and could be improved through weight reduction. In case of water ecotoxicity (total 6 kg)the most influential activity is manufacturing and for soil ecotoxicity (total 3 g) and humantoxicity (total 1.8 kg), material production is the main responsible.From the results, it could also be observed that pretensioner retractor is the component whichhas the largest environmental load, due to its complexity and high number of the componentswhich involve variety of suppliers in its realization.The comparison between airbag and seatbelt shows that considering global warming potentialairbag has larger impact in the production phase and end of life while smaller in the usephase. Regarding acidification and eutrophication, in production phase the results are quitesimilar but in use phase, seatbelt dominates quite significantly. In cases of air and waterecotoxicity and human toxicity the result represents that airbag has larger impacts.Moreover, results signify that production processes carried out in Autoliv’s plants are lessharmful to environment in comparison with the production processes carried out in othersuppliers’ plants and also other phases in the life cycle.The results also prove that transportation has quite low contribution in global warming.The results show that about 70% of seatbelt is recycled and 26.4% is recovered as energy.It is worth to mention that against our initial expectation, studied seatbelt was a quite complexproduct since it has the features of seatbelt pretensioner and load limiter.