Difficulties on Establishing Boundaries in the Environmental Life Cycle Assessment: Considerations on the Primary and Secondary Aluminum Used in Automotive Applications

This paper intends to make some preliminary considerations in the automobile life cycle, this is, from the extraction to the disposal of the material. First of all, a short introduction about the growth of the automotive fleet since past times and its perspectives for now on are presented. It is given a brief description of the life cycle analysis tool, on which the considerations of this study are based, of the aluminum used in automobiles. Due to the lack of data, this study is limited to the verification of developed countries cases and to some stages of the life cycle. When considering energy consumption, there are some immediate preferences concerning a specific stage, when considering other impacts, however, the choice becomes more difficult. This allows the conclusion that the delimitation of impacts in the analysis may lead to results not always implying on the improvement of environmental matters.