Life cycle assessment of absorbent hygiene products aligning with Turkish environmental label criteria

Date

2024-4-25

Author

İli, Beste Beyhan

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Absorbent hygiene products (AHPs), representing a significant market share today, have become essential to everyday life. Their widespread use highlights critical environmental sustainability issues, particularly waste management and resource depletion. Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a crucial tool to enhance the circularity of products like AHPs while preventing potential burden shifting. This thesis presents the first comprehensive LCA study of selected AHPs (baby diapers and feminine sanitary pads) in the Turkish market, employing up-to-date and accurate data. The study, conducted with Simapro 9.2.0.2 software and the Ecoinvent 3.7.1 database, evaluates the environmental impacts of AHPs throughout their life cycle, using the Recipe 2016 (H) method in terms of Midpoint and Endpoint impact categories. Characterization results indicate that the raw material acquisition stage is the primary environmental hotspot in most impact categories for baby diapers and feminine sanitary pads, followed by the end-of-life (EoL) phase in some specific impact categories. The normalized results indicated that the EoL contributes significantly to environmental impact categories with larger relative weights, namely Freshwater vi Ecotoxicity (FE), Marine Ecotoxicity (ME), and Human Carcinogenic Toxicity (HCT). The recommendations developed based on the scenario analysis results include reducing the weight of raw materials, using renewable electricity during manufacturing, and evaluating EoL methods such as composting for biobased materials and energy recovery by incineration. This research significantly enriches the literature by addressing relatively underexplored topics (such as pyrolysis) and contributes developing ecolabel criteria.

Subject Keywords

Life Cycle Assessment, Environmental Labeling, Absorbent Hygiene Products, Sustainability

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/109768

Collections

Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis