Life Cycle Assessment of a Marine-based Fire Control Director system

As a way of dealing with environmental problems, different policies and goals can be set. One of the sectors that often is excluded from these types of regulations is the defence sector, and for the sector to become more sustainable, additional research is needed within this area. This thesis aims to contribute to filling in the knowledge gap about the environmental impact of a defence product, namely a fire control director system, that works both as a radar and optronic tracker. This product is studied as a whole, but also divided into different life cycle phases and into different components. This impact analysis will include a life cycle assessment (LCA). The method for this LCA has followed the ISO 14040 and 14044 standards. The functional unit was set as the usage of a fire control director system to guide and track artillery for 2000 h/year for 30 years. For the gathering of data, different methods were used for different phases of the life cycle. Material data was mostly gathered from eco-footprint reports. For the other phases, data was given or estimated by product experts and/or found online. The results show that, for the functional unit, the product system, in regard to climate change, mineral resource scarcity, fossil resource scarcity and freshwater ecotoxicity, contributes to 590 tonnes CO2-eq, 3.6 tonnes Cu-eq, 170 tonnes oil-eq and 14 tonnes 1.4-DCB-eq respectively. The use phase stands for the majority of this impact in the categories climate change, mineral resource scarcity and fossil resource scarcity. For freshwater ecotoxicity, the material extraction and manufacturing stand for the highest impact. The fire control director component contributes to the most environmental impact, in all the studied impact categories, followed by the cabinet and the hydraulic power unit. A sensitivity analysis on recycled aluminium showed that the environmental impact could be reduced in regard to climate change, mineral resource scarcity and fossil resource