Bridging Theory and Practice in Aircraft End-of-Life: A Life Cycle Assessment Approach

Kurzfassung

Achieving sustainability in aviation involves reducing its environmental impacts across the entire aircraft life cycle, including during the end-of-life (EoL) phase. Understanding the environmental impact of different EoL scenarios, such as reuse, repurpose, recycle, recovery, and landfilling, supports informed decision-making. To enable this understanding, Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) serves as an established method for environmental impact assessment. Current aircraft EoL modelling in LCA relies on assumptions or on results from old literature or projects, such as the Process for Advanced Management of End-of-Life of Aircraft (PAMELA) conducted by Airbus, that do not reflect current industrial practices. This leads to inaccurate environmental impact estimations. To address and reduce this gap, the methodological approach of this thesis to model aircraft EoL in LCA is developed based on EoL scenarios derived from recent literature, industry reports, and expert insights. This thesis also addresses the challenge of different benefits and burdens in EoL allocation methods. The EoL model is applied to the EXACT Turbofan Baseline (D250-TF-2040) aircraft, a short-haul aircraft concept developed at the German Aerospace Center (DLR) for entry into service by 2040. It uses more carbon fibre reinforced plastic than conventional aircraft structures and is powered by kerosene or sustainable aviation fuel. The environmental impacts of this aircraft at EoL, assessed using the cut-off plus credit method with the avoided burden allocation approach, show net benefits in the climate change impact category that are lower than the current literature estimates. This thesis further identifies materials and scenarios that drive impacts in the aircraft EoL phase, with aluminium contributing to high burdens in the recycling EoL scenario. Composites and titanium contribute to high environmental benefits in the reuse EoL scenario. A comparison of different methods for aircraft EoL modelling in LCA highlights the variation in net impacts and their influence on the magnitude of environmental benefits and burdens. Overall, this thesis improves the transparency of aircraft EoL modelling in LCA and highlights the importance of using realistic EoL scenarios.