Bleached pulp from Chilean Eucalyptus process dataset

Description

The data involved in this research represent the resource demand and emissions of the forestry and pulp mills process in Chile. The hypothesis is looking for the quantification of the environmental impacts of the bleached pulp of short fibre in Chile, in order to compare the life cycle performance of the sector. The data includes the forestry activity based on research of Morales et al. (2015) and the pulp industry based on data from the National Environmental Assessment System, where the projects declare their resource consumption, mainly. Complementary information was obtained from direct sources in the industrial plant through personal communication. All the data were obtained and treated in the file, to change the physical basis reported to the basis needed in life cycle assessment. In this sense, 1 ha is the functional unit for the forestry stage and 1 ton of cellulose for the industrial stage. The transport between the forest and the industrial complex was included in the sheet named "Forestry Stage". The data for wood production is reported based on the demand to cultivate 1 hectare of Eucalyptus pulping wood. The data for cellulose production is reported in the "Pulp Industry" sheet and includes the chemicals and fuels consumption, calculation of fossil and biogenic emissions, airborne, wastewater, and solid waste. These data are reported on the basis of 1 tonne of bleached pulp. Using mass and energy balances the raw data were adapted to the pulp production in 2017. These data were input to SimaPro software and obtained the results for LCA by stage and the whole process. The most relevant results show that by far chemical processing is the most environmentally intensive and the rational use of biocides and fertilizers in forestry stage is still a challenge. Also, this study quantifies the amount of biogenic carbon release by ton of pulp finding a rate over 3 ton CO2 biogenic/ton pulp. These results broaden the perspective of the forestry sector, given the relevance to others environmental impacts despite the benefits behind its carbon neutrality.

Steps to reproduce

The data for the forest process were obtained from Morales et al. (2015). All of them were used except the chipping data because in pulp mills this activity was included in the chemical stage in the plant. Morales et al. (2015) report the data based on 1 m3 of fresh chips of eucalyptus with bark and 60% of moisture. Table 1, the herbicide, fertilizer and diammonium phosphate consumption as well as the time machine operation. All of these data were reported based on 1 hectare. Table 2 was used to adapt the number of stems planted in 1 hectare (552 stems) regarding a 20% loss, based on expert information. Also, the harvested pulping wood from 1 hectare was estimated at 310 tons/ha based on expert information. The chemicals, the pine bark, EPS, freshwater and CO2 were addressed to this amount of stems. Then, only the emissions associated with the degradation of fertilizers and biocides were directly expressed. In the same sense, from Table 4, the emissions from fertilizer were included as well as the production of chemicals and fuels from Ecoinvent. The functional unit was 1 tonne moisture wood. The airborne from the use of machines was attached to their time operations. All these data processes were modelled in SimaPro to be organized in two stages: forestry and industrial, including the transport from forest to industrial plant in the former stage.

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