Environmental impacts, water footprint and cumulative energy demand of match industry in Pakistan

A comprehensive life cycle assessment (LCA) was conducted for the matchsticks industry in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan to quantify environmental footprint, water footprint, cumulative energy use, and to identify improvement opportunities in the matchsticks manufacturing process. One carton of matchsticks was used as reference unit for this study. Foreground data was collected from the matchsticks industry through questionnaire surveys, personal meetings, and field measurements. The collected data was transformed into potential environmental impacts through the Centre for Environment Studies (CML) 2000 v.2.05 method present by default in the SimaPro v.9.1 software. Water footprint was calculated using methodology developed by Hoekstra et al., 2012 (water scarcity index) V1.02 and cumulative energy demand by SimaPro v.9.1 software. The results showed that transport of primary material (wood logs), sawn wood for matchsticks, red phosphorous, acrylic varnish, and kerosene fuel oil contributed to the overall environmental impacts. Transport of primary materials and sawn timber for matchsticks contributed significantly to abiotic depletion, global warming, eutrophication potential, ozone depletion, corrosion, human toxicity, and aquatic ecotoxicity effects. The total water footprint for manufacturing one carton of matchsticks was 0.265332 m3, whereas the total cumulative energy demand was 715.860 Mega Joules (MJ), mainly sourced from non-renewable fossil fuels (708.979 MJ). Scenario analysis was also conducted for 20% and 30% reduction in the primary material distance covered by trucks and revealed that reducing direct material transport distances could diminish environmental impacts and energy consumption. Therefore, environmental footprint could be minimized through diverting matchsticks industries freight from indigenous routes to high mobility highways and by promoting industrial forestry close to industrial zones in Pakistan. Many industries did not have emissions control systems, exceeding the permissible limit for emissions established by the National Environmental Quality Standards (NEQS) of Pakistan. Thus, installation of emissions control system could also diminish emissions from match industry in Pakistan.