Impactos ambientais provenientes do transporte na avaliação do ciclo de vida (ACV) de tubulações em pvc e pex utilizadas na execução de sistemas prediais de Água Fria

Abstract

The transport sector and civil construction are examples of branches of the economy that, while expanding, increase their share of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions into the atmosphere. An artifact that can contribute to improving this scenario is the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), a methodology that highlights the possible environmental impacts of activities and/or products and serves as a parameter to determine points that can contribute to the sustainability of the process in question. study. However, despite being an efficient tool, most LCAs have ignored the influences of transport, an act that can result in misleading data, especially in countries with poor infrastructure and technological equity, such as Brazil. Even so, a certain lack of LCAs is observed for building systems products, especially those where one material is compared to another. In this context, the objective is to detect the participation of distribution logistics in the release of atmospheric pollutants in the life cycle of PVC and PEX pipes, two types of materials that can be used in the execution of cold water systems in buildings. To this end, road transport between existing Brazilian factories and five strategic cities in the country, each in a different region, will be evaluated, using the Ecoinvent v3.5 and Industry Data v2.0 databases and OpenLCA modeling software. It was thought that transport has a variable participation in the pollutant emission rates within the life cycle of the pipes, depending on factors such as availability of infrastructure and technology for assembling factories close to consumption sites. PEX in the north region reached more than 75% of the material's life cycle carbon emissions, while in the southeast region this percentage did not exceed 3% for both pipelines. It was also identified that PEX pipes maintain a more ecological environmental behavior in cases where transport distances for distribution logistics are smaller or similar to those of PVC and this, in turn, is only less polluting when its locomotion path is shorter. showed 76% lower than that of PEX.