Glass fibre filled polypropylene is widely used in automotive
applications such as automobile radiator tanks, front end assembly,
body panels and closures. In many of these applications it
replaces steel. However, stiffness of steel (7.8 GPa) is much higher
than GF–PP composite (3.5–4.5 GPa). Maintaining the stiffness of
a body panel using a material with a significantly lower Young’s
modulus requires a sizable increase in part thickness which inturn
increases the part weight and fuel consumption during its entire
life. In automotive LCA, use phase contributes around 70–90%
of total environmental burdens. Hence only the use phase, fuel
savings, of automotive body panel are evaluated and presented in
Fig. 10. The results represent the probable fuel savings that can
be achieved when steel body panel is replaced with the composites
made of recycled and virgin polypropylene. The fuel savings
achieved by virgin plastics composites and recycled plastic composites
are quite similar, however, virgin plastics show a better
performance