Mid Sweden University

Lubricant oils are used for a range of applications. One of the applications are as rolling oil for drawing of metal wires. Sandvik AB is a company that produces metal wires and other products using rolling mills and are therefore dependent on lubricant oils for their operation. A problem Sandvik AB encountered were that contaminants in the oil that comes from the operation itself damaged the wires in various ways and leads to stops in the production and material waste. Conventional filter cleaning was not effective enough which lead to an increased concentration of small particles and a need to change the oil in the system four times per year. RecondOil AB come up with a way to recycle the oil and remove particles from the oil, that is too small or light to be removed with filters or centrifuges, with a system called ROCCO.

The goal with this screening LCA is to quantify the environmental impacts of the two systems, regarding global warming potential, acidifying potential and human toxicity potential. The geographical boundary is Sweden. The functional unit is based on production of wires, but as the production numbers is not available for the public a ten-year production of wires will be set to 100 units for the ROCCO system and will be the functional unit.

Global warming potential, acidifying potential and human toxicity potential are reduced with around 90 percent after the installation of ROCCO, this is roughly equal to the reduction in oil use compared to the original system. After weighting of the impact categories, with the EDIP97 method, it is possible to conclude that the global warming potential is the impact category with the largest environmental impact of the impact categories assessed in this study.

If the waste oil is re-refined instead of incinerated, as it has been calculated in the main model, the impact on global warming is about 15 percent lower with the ROCCO system compared with the original system. If the ROCCO system was run with a German energy mix instead of Swedish energy mix, as in the main model, the impact on global warming is about 60 percent lower with the ROCCO system compared with the original system. If the ROCCO system is run on German energy mix and the waste oil are re-refined the impact on global warming are larger with the ROCCO system compared with the original system.