Life Cycle Assessment of Mattress Products

Date

2023-12-08

Author

Kılıç, Elif Ekin

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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The contemporary global scenario is marked by escalating environmental concerns, encompassing issues such as climate change, land use, water utilization. In order to maintain environmental health and community well-being, there is a growing emphasis on assessment the life cycles of products integral to our daily lives. These products, from inception with raw materials and chemicals to their eventual disposal, significantly contribute to the aforementioned environmental challenges. Consequently, there is a burgeoning motivation for companies to adopt sustainable practices and design eco-friendly products. Sustainable design, characterized by optimized energy and resource utilization, has emerged as a pivotal strategy, urging companies to innovate and develop environmentally conscious solutions. This paradigm shift towards sustainability is underscored by the increasing global prevalence of eco-labeling for a diverse array of products. These labels often hinge on criteria rooted in life cycle assessments (LCA), providing a comprehensive evaluation of a product's environmental impact. Mattresses, playing a pivotal role in daily life, exemplify products with significant environmental footprints. LCA studies on mattresses aim to enhance their environmental performance and facilitate sustainable design. The study at hand focuses on investigating the environmental impacts of three distinct mattress types—spring, hybrid, and foam mattresses—utilizing a cradle-to-grave approach within the framework of LCA. To achieve this objective, the study undertakes specific tasks for each mattress type, including identifying the life cycle stage that predominantly contributes to overall environmental impacts and conducting sensitivity analyses for parameters exerting the most influence on these impacts. Employing SimaPro version 9.2.0.2 PhD software and the ReCiPe 2016 (H) method, the study evaluates the entire life cycle of the mattresses, with a double-size mattress of 90x200 as the functional unit. The findings illuminate that the preparation stage of semi-finished products emerges as a pivotal contributor across all three mattress types. Specifically, for spring and hybrid mattresses, the wire drawing process in the preparation of bonnel springs and the cotton production involved in quilting for hybrid mattresses exert the highest environmental impacts, respectively. In the case of foam mattresses, the primary contributor is Polyol usage during foam preparation. To explore avenues for enhancing environmental performance, the study conducts five distinct LCA studies, encompassing scenarios such as altering disposal methods, conducting sensitivity analyses for cotton usage, changing electricity sources, integrating coconut fiber, and modifying fiber bonding methods. Based on the elucidated scenarios aforementioned, it is deduced that the reduction of cotton utilization constitutes a pivotal strategy for augmenting the environmental performance of hybrid mattresses. Furthermore, a shift in disposal method, transitioning from landfill to incineration, emerges as a efficacious alternative for mitigating the global warming impact associated with spring mattresses.

Subject Keywords

Life Cycle Assessment, Mattress Industry, SimaPro, Sustainable Product

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/107745

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis