At the request of the Public Waste Agency of Flanders (OVAM) a brief study was conducted on the environmental impact of the Belgian carpet supply chain, as part of the project “Partnership in the carpet chain to address sustainable resource use”. To this end a ‘rough and ready’ LCA study was carried out to gain insight into three issues:
The supply chain was modelled with the LCA software package Simapro, using the EcoInvent database and existing LCA studies, supplemented with data from the literature. For the extraction/production of pile materials a range of environmental impacts were assessed, while for the other links the climate impact expressed as cumulative energy demand (CED) was taken as a measure of overall environmental impact.
Some of the main conclusions: