MIKADO : a decision support tool for pollution reduction in aluminium pressure die casting

• Author(s): Belmira Neto
• Date: 2007
• Persistent ID: https://hdl.handle.net/10216/7147
• Origin: Repositório Aberto da Universidade do Porto
• Subject(s): Ciências do ambiente; Environmental science
• Document Type: Doctoral thesis
• Language: Portuguese

Description

Industrial activities cause a variety of environmental problems. These are largely caused by emissions of air pollutants, the production of waste and depletion of natural resources. As a consequence, industrial managers face a complex problem when assessing the overall environmental pressure on the environment, and options to reduce this pressure. This complexity is associated with the range of activities taking place in industrial processes, the variety and complexity of their environmental effects, the number of available technologies for pollution control, and the costs of pollution reduction. Despite this complexity, pollution reduction in industry is not always based on systematic analyses, nor on clearly defined company priorities to environmental management. An important reason for this is a lack of integrated analyses of the environmental impact of industrial processes, the options to reduce this impact and the associated costs. An instrument to assist plant managers in deciding on environmental management is of utmost importance. However, a decision support tool that takes a company perspective and covers all relevant environmental issues as well as costs of environmental management is currently not available in the literature. The overall objective of the thesis is to develop a decision support tool to analyse options to reduce the environmental impact of an industrial company. A model is developed for the assessment of the potential environmental impact resulting from emissions of environmental pollutants, as well as the effectiveness of reduction options and the associated costs. The tool aims to take a company perspective and to assist the company management in the analyses of possible strategies to improve the company's environmental performance. An industrial plant, supplying the automotive industry with aluminium pressure die casting products, located in Portugal, served as case study. The following research questions are addressed: 1) What existing environmental systems analysis methods and tools can in principle be combined in a decision support tool and used to analyse the environmental performance of a plant from a company perspective? 2) Which technical pollution reduction options are available for reducing the environmental impact of an aluminium pressure die casting plant? What are their technical potentials to reduce this impact, and the associated costs for the plant? 3) How can a model be developed that can be used from a company perspective to analyse options to reduce the environmental impact of aluminium pressure die casting? 4) How do different strategies to combine pollution reduction options improve the environmental performance of an aluminium pressure die casting plant, and what are the associated costs for the plant?