Sustainability in the auto repair industry: a life cycle assessment application

The growth of sustainability awareness has driven many industries to provide 'greener' products and processes and promote new approaches to improve their environmental performances. In particular, life cycle assessment (LCA) is a framework for estimating the environmental impacts of a product, a process or a service throughout its life cycle. The applications of LCA in the automotive industry have mainly focused on the technological innovation of product or manufacturing processes. Conversely, automotive companies have not concentrated their efforts on promoting sustainable actions on service activities although the application of sustainability concepts in this context should represent a new way to reach competitiveness. Purpose of this paper is to present and discuss the applicability of LCA-based methods in the automotive industry for the development of a sustainable auto repair network, in order to fulfil environmental and economical benefits. An empirical application in a body repair workshop is presented to validate the proposed methods.