Carbon footprint in automotive industry

The work on this topic aims to cover all the relevant knowledge applied to deal with the carbon footprint released by automotive manufacturing activities. The brief overview on the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), other International Organizations, like International Organization for Standardizations (ISO), calculation and reporting methods of carbon footprint, effects of carbon footprint on human health and climate change, global automotive industry, and its carbon footprint related literatures were also included in this study. Carbon footprint can be happened in all stages of life cycles for the production process. However, for this work, we mainly focus on calculation of the amount of carbon footprint in unit of carbon equivalent during the automotive manufacturing operation of the main plant. All data needed for the calculation was received from the automotive plants and emission factors of each data were obtained from other concerning organizations, such as Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Greenhouse Gases Protocol developed by the World Resources Institute (WRI) and World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) in accordance with the recognized ISO 14064-1, quantification and reporting of greenhouse gas emissions and removals. As a result, emissions from total number of 1 million car produced per year are the most important source among other carbon emission sources of automotive manufacturing, and the calculation of emission sources from generating electrical energy was included as well. To reduce carbon footprint, particularly, from generation of electrical energy, for example, solar energy was recommended as an alternative energy source that gives significant benefits to factory, and in the end, the cost of solar panels needed to use was also calculated. Keywords: Carbon footprint, climate change, automotive industry, carbon equivalent