This research project is aiming at the advancement of a particular evaluation instrument concerning the life cycle management of WPC, which was developed within the research project AiF project no. 14987 N. Based on the previous work, the evaluation instrument will be enhanced in such a way that it may serve plastics processors to put into practice a comprehensive life cycle management with respect to a concrete, market-relevant product with a defined product benefit.

The plastic processing industry, especially SMEs, shall be enabled to realize a sustainability benchmarking of their products. This starts by defining a target value using the most sustainable product as of today as the point of reference. The benchmarking is accomplished by comparing the plastic product in the context of a sustainability evaluation with a non-plastic product in the market.

For this purpose, all phases of the life cycle (production, use and disposal) must be analyzed in detail from an ecological and an economic perspective. The comparison is done using the example of terrace flooring which is at present the most important application of WPC (compared to solid wood of different types of wood and wood qualities).

The tasks of ITAS in this project are:

1. The specification of the parameters for the analysis of the life cycle assessment and of the life cycle costing in co-operation with all project partners for the case of terrace flooring.
2. Performing a life cycle assessment for solid wood terrace flooring including the generation of all data needed and the calculation of the LCI.

The download of the final report is available at SKZ (keyword "FV 336").