Background and Objectives: The paper production industry is one of the largest industries in the world. It accounts for 2% of the world's industrial pollution emissions. Solutions aimed at reducing damage and waste are needed to achieve sustainability and reduce the negative impacts of continuous paper production. Life cycle assessment is a tool for assessing the energy consumption and environmental impacts of a product, process or service, from raw material extraction to production, transportation, use, disposal and recycling. The aim of this study is to assess the life cycle of the writing paper production process in the Mazandaran Wood and Paper Industries Company based on the international ReCiPe 2016 method and using Simapro software to investigate the environmental impacts of writing paper production in the Mazandaran Wood and Paper Industries Company and to determine the points with the highest share of pollution emissions in the writing paper production process.
Materials and Methods: In this study, the necessary information was collected through communication with the Mazandaran Wood and Paper Industries Company factory and in direct and indirect ways. In this study, a gate-to-gate life cycle assessment of writing paper was conducted from the beginning to the end of the writing paper production line. The final data from the inventory analysis phase and the impact assessment phase, which included midpoint categories indicators (climate change, ozone depletion, ionizing radiation, human health ozone formation, fine particle formation, terrestrial ecosystem ozone formation, land acidification, freshwater eutrophication, marine eutrophication, terrestrial ecotoxicity, freshwater ecotoxicity, marine ecotoxicity, human carcinogenic toxicity, human non-carcinogenic toxicity, land use or utilization, mineral resource depletion, fossil resource depletion, water consumption) and endpoint categories indicators (damage assessment, normalization and weighting) were examined and evaluated.
Results: The findings from the assessment show us that in the LCI section, carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels (313 kg) and suspended solid particles (625 kg) have a higher share than other items. In examining the midpoint categories indicators, the findings also show that based on the share of emissions in 18 impact categories, electricity consumption (39.3%) in the scarcity of fossil resources (0.152) and wood pulp (89.8%) in the scarcity of mineral resources (8.85×4-10) have the highest share of impact. The examination of the endpoint categories indicators (including damage assessment, normalization, and weighting) also shows that based on the three damage categories (human health, ecosystems, and resources) in the damage assessment, electricity consumption (39%) and wood pulp (29.6%) have the highest share in the resource category (0.153). Also, in normalization, electricity consumption (2.93×10-5) and wood pulp (2.85×10-5) have the highest share of impact on human health (1.19×10-4). In weighting, writing paper (60) and wood pulp (6.22) have the highest share of impact in the ecosystems category (5.85).
Conclusion: In general, the results of the study showed that electricity consumption and wood pulp have the highest share of environmental impacts in a writing paper production process.