Environmental impacts of reclamation and recycling processes of refrigerators using life cycle assessment (LCA) methods

China has enacted a series of policies and regulations that require manufacturers to reclaim and recycle obsolete refrigerators to mitigate the life cycle environmental impacts and to improve resource efficiency. However, it is not clear whether the environmental benefits of recycling refrigerators can be balanced with the emissions from the reclamation and recycling processes. To address this issue, environmental impacts of recycling refrigerators under different scenarios were quantified through a comparative life cycle assessment. The data were mainly acquired from a large professional refrigerator recycling company. The CML 2001 method built in the GaBi software (Version 6.0) was used to quantify the environmental impacts. The result shows that the environmental benefits brought about by recycling mainly come from the resource and energy savings in the upstream production, such as in the high impact polystyrene recycling (22.17%), the steel recycling (23.94%), and the copper recycling (8.10%) phases. Compared to railway, motor is a more environmentally friendly transportation for refrigerators. Recycling refrigerators increase the ozone layer depletion potential because the crushing process inevitably releases the CFC-11. The environmental impacts of transportation may exceed the environmental benefit of recycling refrigerators. This study will be useful for manufacturers to design new recycling networks from the life cycle and environmental impact perspectives. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.