SIEMENS

It was a power company in Italy that got the ball rolling. Seeking information for its recycling documentation, the company asked Siemens in 2005 about the substances contained in its Siprotec power protection devices. Siprotec devices prevent high-voltage lines and terminal equipment from being damaged in the event of excess voltage or lightning strikes.

"That was the start of life cycle assessment for the Siprotec device family," says Frank Walachowicz of Siemens Corporate Technology (CT) in Berlin. Walachowicz and his team of materials experts were asked to completely dismantle the shoebox-sized Siprotec protection devices, study their insides, and assess their environmental friendliness.

Among the questions to be answered by the team were the following: What resources were used in the production of the coils, resistors, circuits, and capacitors? How much primary energy was used in the process? What emissions and wastes were produced during their manufacture, transport, operation and disposal? The CT experts began by preparing a materials declaration and then designing a life cycle assessment model that was based on the data revealed by their research. The result demonstrated that climate-relevant emissions occur primarily during the use phase of the protection devices' life cycle.

In the late 1990s, the question of the environmental impact of a product over its entire life cycle was still a rather exotic subject pursued by universities and research institutes. The first simplified method for measuring climate-relevant emissions was introduced in early 2000. Since then, life cycle assessments have developed into a holistic tool for the collection, documentation, and graphic representation of environmentally relevant data. A life cycle assessment can be prepared for a single product. It can refer to a transportation process or be tailored to a plant.

"When I joined CT in 1991, software was extremely limited in term of its ability to process information. Nor was it possible to model process sequences and material flows for products, production lines or locations. You had to laboriously enter all of the data into an Excel spreadsheet," recalls Walachowicz.

Today, however, his team has better tools at its disposal — namely, commercial software such as GaBi (an acronym based on German words for holistic balancing), with which comprehensive life cycle balances can be prepared.

GaBi also helps CT staff with the management of large volumes of data and the modeling of product life cycles. "Once models have been created, we think about what can be improved. For example, we try to make the processes more energy-efficient and less resource-intensive," explains Walachowicz. Even though GaBi takes a lot of work off their hands, CT experts like him still spend roughly 80 % of their working time looking for information about materials or component substances.

One of the first orders for the preparation of a comprehensive life cycle assessment was received in 2005 from Siemens' former Communications Division, which wanted an assessment of a family of telephone systems. This was followed by similar orders pertaining to mobile phones and medical devices. "But it was the order from Italy for power protection devices that started the trend toward determining the environmental impact of products," says Walachowicz.

The reduced availability of resources such as water and energy is forcing companies worldwide to do business with an eye to the long term. Life cycle assessments help them to intensify their efforts to protect the environment while putting these efforts on an objective foundation.

Why Corex/Finex Cuts Emissions. In 2008, Siemens' Industry Solutions Division asked Walachowicz and his team to assess Corex/Finex, two innovative processes for the production of pig iron. The Corex technology (see Pictures of the Future, Fall 2006, Metals for the Megacities)was developed by Austrian Siemens subsidiary VAI — which today is part of Siemens Industry Solutions — and is considered to be particularly easy on the environment. With conventional blast furnace processes, coke and sinter are required to produce pig iron from iron ore. A Corex plant, on the other hand, can be operated with ordinary hard coal. Finex is a refinement of Corex. Here, the pig iron is produced from ore fines in a single process step. Neither a coking plant nor a sintering plant are required with Corex/Finex. Thus, not only is resource consumption lower, but investment and production costs are also lower than with a conventional blast furnace.

The Technical University of Denmark, the Technical University of Berlin, and the University of Leoben in Austria also participated in drawing up the life cycle assessment. "Siemens contributed the steel-making expertise and the universities provided the methodological foundation for the life cycle assessment," says Walachowicz. Scientists compared the Corex/Finex process with that of a traditional blast furnace and measured impact on air, water, and soil. Every step was assessed, from mining and preparation of raw materials to manufacturing processes and processes such as dedusting, scrubbing, and desulphurization.

"There are enormous differences, particularly with respect to emissions. The blast furnace process produces significantly more sulfur dioxide per metric ton of pig iron than does Corex/Finex. Emissions of dust and oxides of nitrogen are similarly reduced. And post- Corex/Finex waste water contains significantly less ammonia, phenols, and sulfides," says Wolfgang Grill of Siemens VAI.

Grill, an expert from VAI's Reduction Technology department, has been working on the development of the Corex process for five years. He points out that one of the major advantages of the process is that steel producers can use the gas produced during the Corex process to drive turbines and thus generate electricity for their own use. "Even though the production of steel continues to be associated with the consumption of energy and resources as well as CO₂ emissions, Corex/Finex has a much better life cycle assessment than the blast furnace process. Corex/Finex is particularly advantageous in economies where sulfur-rich coal is used to generate electricity," concludes Walachowicz. That's because the high-energy-value gas produced during the production of pig iron can replace conventional process sequences in power generation.

The gas can be converted into electrical energy in a combined-cycle power plant to help cover a steel plant's own electrical power requirements. "The Corex process helps to reduce CO₂ emissions by up to 30 %, but that's not all.

It also has the advantage that it does not contribute to the acidification of the environment. This is of particular benefit in China, because the coal-fired power plants there burn locally-mined hard coal characterized by a high sulfur content," says Walachowicz.

One of the reasons that the Siemens Sectors are so interested in the expertise built up by Walachowicz and his team is that Siemens has mandated the use of efficiency-enhancing technologies and materials in all of its products and the avoidance of CO₂ emissions. Siemens has invested a great deal of effort over many years in continuously refining its own environmental management system, which includes the company standard SN 36 350 for the "environmentally compatible design of products and plants."

This standard helps company development engineers to comply with the environmental declaration that is required by the German government. Even more important in Walachowicz's eyes is consideration of environmental impact during the development process prior to the construction of a plant and the product production process itself — a task for which life cycle assessments are ideally suited. Environmental assessments also drive competition for the most environmentally friendly developments. "Life cycle assessments enable Siemens business units to show how much better they are than the competition," says Walachowicz.