Assessing the environmental impacts of a tool rental service from Husqvarna using Life Cycle Assessment  Confirmation that the opposition is completed

Abstract: To decouple ever-increasing production and the related environmental impacts, collaborative use of products and product-service-systems including rental services can help to intensify the use of products during their designed lifetimes. While these approaches present potential to decrease environmental impacts compared to traditional linear product sales, they need to be assessed with a holistic scope to avoid counterintuitive trade-offs. This study evaluates the potential environment impacts of Husqvarna’s tool rental service with a hypothetical case example from Stockholm, Sweden. The objectives are to analyse the potential environmental impacts of the rental service, to identify hotspots for improvement and to compare the potential impacts of the rental system to a sales alternative. The annual service of one electric chainsaw is analysed using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology with different user scenarios. The potential impacts are analysed for global warming potential, fossil and mineral resource scarcity, marine ecotoxicity and human carcinogenic and non-carcinogenic toxicity. The analysis for the rental system shows that user transport back-and-forth to the rental service is a key contributor to all the environmental impacts analysed, if done by private cars. The comparative results to sales business model indicate that while the rental service can help to reduce the potential impacts in mineral resource scarcity and toxicities due to the lower number of products needed, the user transport may outweigh the potential improvements in global warming potential and fossil resource scarcity, depending on the distances and modes of transport. Different scenarios illustrate that the results are however sensitive to the assumptions made. Based on the results, it can be recommended to optimally place the service close to the users and to take efforts to reduce user transports around the service, to reach the environmental potential of the service. The sensitivity analyses also indicate the importance for accounting detailed data for LCAs for product-service-systems and covering the service holistically in system boundaries. Further studies on user behaviour are suggested to reach more robust analyses on consumer services, to cover also potential rebound effects.