LCA
Life Cycle Assessment
LCA assessment of the environmental footprint of doors produced by Braga S.p.A.
Braga S.p.A., with the technical support of Rete Clima, carried out a comparative LCA assessment of three types of internal door kits, each consisting of a door panel and two accessory kits (frames and architraves), all manufactured in-house.
The study was carried out with reference to the guidelines of ISO 14025 for Environmental Product Declarations (EPD), in accordance with the relevant sector rules (“Indoor and Outdoor Furniture”) and following the technical methodology of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), as indicated in UNI EN ISO 14040 and 14044 standards (2021).
LCA represents an analytical and systematic tool used to assess the environmental footprint of a product or service from a life-cycle perspective.
Starting from the extraction of raw materials that make up the product, and then moving through its production, distribution, use phase and final disposal, the application of this methodology allows the overall environmental impact values to be determined objectively, as they are analysed over the entire life cycle.
The study analysed the environmental impacts over the life cycle, from the origin of raw materials to delivery to the customer, of three types of internal door kits, each consisting of a panel and two accessory kits, namely architraves and frames. The three types differ from one another in the internal core of the panel, resulting in doors with honeycomb core (with an internal structure made of recycled cardboard), perforated particleboard core, and single-layer blockboard core (with a custom-cut spruce wood core).
The functional unit, i.e. the object of the analysis to which the results refer, is a single door kit consisting of the panel and accessory kits. It is emphasised that the entire analysis was carried out using primary data, meaning data collected directly for all production phases.
The assessment of the environmental footprint was performed using the Environmental Footprint (EF 3.1) impact calculation methodology, the European reference standard for LCA, developed by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission.
EF 3.1
considers 16 impact categories covering the main environmental effects: climate change, acidification, eutrophication, toxicity for human health and ecosystems, resource use, water, land use, and others.
EF 3.1
is a key tool both for managing and reducing environmental impacts and for environmental communication, as well as for European policy, particularly in the context of the Green Deal and the circular economy.
The results of the assessment show that the most impactful kit is the perforated particleboard one (except for the land use category), due to the more complex production processes to which the panel is subjected.
It should be emphasised that over 90% of Braga’s production consists of panels with a honeycomb core, which proved to be the product with the lowest environmental impact for all impact categories considered.
Extension of the study: carbon stock in door wood
Wood is a material that by its nature stores large amounts of atmospheric CO₂: during the growth of the tree, carbon is fixed and effectively “stored” within the wood, remaining there even after the wood has undergone processing, such as that required to manufacture a door.
Therefore, this carbon stock can be calculated and accounted for: the result of the Carbon Footprint impact category may thus take this benefit into account.
The emissive impact of the three door panels was therefore calculated using the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) methodology, the United Nations agency for climate science, which allows the total CO₂ emitted over the life cycle of a product to be calculated while separating the amount of CO₂ stored in the wood.
The results show that, for all product types, greenhouse gas emissions are drastically reduced thanks to the CO₂ stock stored in the wood that makes up the doors. In particular, the best result is observed for the panel with a single-layer blockboard core, where the use of a “solid” wood panel naturally leads to greater carbon storage.
