Results of this typical LCA application will support the cleaner
production of remanufacturing industry and cleaning methods
selection for greener consumption. It can also provide a reference
for later case studies involved in remanufacturing cleaning. The
process planning engineer can achieve better environmental performance
by improving and optimizing the cleaning process based
on this study. However, results in this study just represent a typical
case and may not reflect the general situation. The outcomes of
future other cases applied with identical LCA model in this paper
would slightly change within a certain range considering different
working condition. Additionally, many simplifications and hypotheses
may also increase the uncertainties of results. Another
limitation is that environmental indicators like noisy pollution in
the cleaning process are not taken into account in this study. In the
future work, environmental impacts of many more cleaning technologies
are needed to be assessed to complete a comprehensive
view of remanufacturing cleaning. Moreover, a LCA application on
one cleaning method should be conducted on various equipment,
components, product lot size etc. to explore the effects of these
working conditions on the final results, which would further help
to evaluate the reliability of this study. High price of SCCO2 cleaning
equipment is one barrier hampering its application in industry.
Technical verification and safety assurance of the equipment, a high
pressure vessel essentially, should be researched in the future. By
then, comprehensive LCA application combined with life cycle cost
assessment should also be further explored for its market
promotion.