A FUZZY LOGIC-BASED LIFECYCLE COMPARISON OF

DIGITAL AND FILM CAMERAS'

Bo Yang, Yanchun Luo, and Mengchu Zhou2

Multi-Lifecycle Engineering Research Center

New Jersey Institute of Technology
Newark, NJ 07102, USA
Tel. 973-596-6282, Fax. -5680, Email: Zhou@njit.edu

Abstract
This paper presents a fuzzy logic-based lifecycle assessment (LCA) model. This model considers criteria of
environmental, recycling, together with cost, quality, reliability and performance variables, and covers a product
lifecycle from design, material procurement, manufacturing, usage to disposal. Traditional LCA suffers from
problems of imprecisionlincomplete input data and difficult interpretation of output data. The proposed fuzzy logic-
based LCA model can resolve these problems by employing a fuzzy model such that both accurate and imprecise
dada can be easily handled and the results are understandable to experts and non-experts. The input data that include
economic inventory, physical value, dimensionless indicator or even qualitative measure (such as performance and
reliability) are all well modeled by using the proposed method. The output can be interpreted using linguistic
variables. An interesting comparison of digital cameras (DC) and film cameras (FC) is performed by applying this
method. Among all the lifecycle stages of DC and FC, usage and disposal stages are two important ones and is the
focus of this paper. Energy consumption, media material consumption, solid waste, chemical wastes, fluid waste,
and recyclability are successfully and seamlessly combined for evaluating the environmental impacts of DC and FC.

Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) aims to analyze a

I. Background
More and more attentions have been paid to the
lifecycle performance of a product, particularly to
electronic consumer product due to its massive usage
and thus potential environmental impact. The thought
of considering the product lifecycle as a whole and
striving for the total benefit as the target can give
designers a vision to improve the environmentally
friendliness of a product, and guide consumers to
develop a sustainable consuming habit. Reliable and
accurate lifecycle assessment has been identified as a
key step in implementing Design for Environment
(DFE) or Green Design into industry. DFE is a
systematic process by which f m s design products
and processes in an environmentally conscious way.
It requires environmental considerations over a
complete product life cycle in the design process.
design by examining all its aspects from the
preparation of input materials to end-use. LCA
evaluates the types and quantities of product inputs,
e.g., energy, raw materials, and water, and outputs,
e.g., atmospheric emissions, solid and aqueous waste.
A complete LCA methodology should include
I definition of scope and boundaries, inventory
- analysis, impact analysis, and improvement analysis
[Graedel and Allenby, 19951. There are a number of
LCA approaches reported in the literature as
documented in [Graedel and Allenby, 1995; Hersh,
19981. LCA tools that implement a full LCA analysis
include, for example, Eco-it, GaBiSoftware, TEAM,
and SimaPro 4.0 [Jin, 19991. Since it is unlikely that
one single LCA methodology can be optimal for all
LCA analysis, differences can be found in these
tools, depending on the boundaries set by the tool and
the specific problems it is designed to solve. Some

'
This work is supported by the New Jersey Commission on Science and Technology through the Multi-lifecycle
Engineering Research Center at NJIT.
The corresponding author, ECE Dept., NJIT, Newark, NJ 07102-1982, USA

0-7803-5962-3/00/$10.OO 02000 IEEE 304

software tools deal with energy at just one life-cycle
stage rather than the total lifecycle. They vary in the
type of databases of materials they use. These
implemented LCA approaches and tools suffer from
two drawbacks:
They heavily depend upon exact, complete and
precise data that is unfortunately not always
available. Their outputs cause some dlffculty to
be explained among even experts not to mention
those outside LCA fields; and
They are very much limited to a single life cycle,
i.e., material extraction, production, use,
recovery and disposal. They lack a systems
perspective for multi-lifecycles of a product and
its constituents.
To overcome these two shortcomings, two research
areas in LCA recently became active. One is the topic
presented in this paper, i.e., to use fuzzy logic or
linguistic variables to deal with incompletehmprecise
input data and explain the output data. Fuzzy logic
concepts and related theory have been widely applied
to various areas of design, modeling, forecast,
control, and decision making [Lai and Hwang, 1994;
Manikopoulos, et al., 1995; Pedrycz, 1995; Zhang
and Yu, 19951. The other is to develop multi-
lifecycle assessment methodologies and tools [Jin,
1999; Zhou, et al., 20001. In the latter, in addition to
those mentioned stages, the methodology also
stresses the stages of Packaging and Distribution,
Demanufacturing, Remanufacturing (for product and
part reuse), Reengineering (for material recycling),
and Energy Recovery.
The next section presents the idea behind a Fuzzy
logic-based lifecycle comparison model. Section 3
presents the application of the proposed method to
the comparison of film cameras and digital cameras.
Both offer only very limited environmentally related
data. Section 4 concludes the paper.
Fuzzy Variable E (emission)
(a)
Figure 1. Membership Function of Fuzzy Variables
305
U[. Fuzzy Logic-based Lifecycle Comparison
Model
In practice, when Lifecycle Assessment (LCA) or
Comparison (LCC) is performed, inventory data are
usually fuzzy or imprecise because of incomplete or
non-obtainable information. For instance, available
labor hours and available material may be “around
120” hours and “about 150” units, respectively.
Similarly, the environmental burden such as green
house gas emission may be “about 0.2” kg per
product manufactured and estimates of toxic
chemical released may be “nearly 0.3” kg per usage
hour. Moreover, imprecise data are sometimes
described by linguistic terms. For examples, the
performance of a camera is “excellent, good, fair, or
poor”, but not by probability. Thus, conventional
probability theory may not be an appropriate method
to model the imprecise nature. Fuzzy set theory, on
the other hand, provides a better tool to represent
fuzzy input data by formulating the values using
membership functions. Some prevailing forms of
membership functions are depicted in Fig. 1. Fig. l(a)
is trapezoid function that can be used to model fuzzy
variable E (emission), and Fig. l(b) shows triangle
function formulating fuzzy variable C (cost). In this
study, the grade of a member function p indicates a
subjective degree of satisfaction with given tolerance.
It is noted that nonlinear functions such as piece-wise
linear, exponential, power, hyperbolic, inverse
hyperbolic, etc., may also be adopted as member
functions.
With fuzzy modeled inventory data, and fuzzy
assessment approach, we provide a Fuzzy Logic-
based Lifecycle Comparison (FLLC) model as shown
in Fig. 2, which consists of five principal
components: lifecycle boundary defmition, lifecycle
inventory, ,data fuzzifier, fuzzy assessment, and result
interpretation.
Fuzzy Variable C (cost)
(b)

Manufacturing
UsageiMaintenance
Energy
-b RecycleAlisposal Performance
Lifecycle Boundary Lifecvcle
Definition Inventory
Fig. 2. Fuzzy Logic-based Lifecycle Assessment Model
A. Lifecycle boundary definition
The fust step is to set up the boundary of the study.
The lifecycle of a product consists of several
different stages. Those stages having apparent effects
in terms of environmental and cost issues are
selected. For electronic consumer products, the
lifecycle stages typically are material production,
manufacturing, usage and maintenance, and finally
disposal or recycling. A camera’s lifecycle, for
example, begins from material extraction and
production, in which raw material or feedstock
materials are extracted and synthesized. Then it goes
through a manufacturing stage which usually
consumes energy and releases process residues. After
that it enters usage stage, in which energy is
consumed, media materials such as film and
photopaper are consumed. Certain chemicals used to
process the film also generate environmental burdens.
In the disposalhecycling stage, we should consider
the scenario of product disposal and material
recycling.
B. Lifecycle inventory
In this step, an objective, data-based process of
quantifying energy usage, material flows, and
environmental releases throughout the defined
lifecycle stages of a product is conducted. In our
study, the data is collected from experiment,
literature survey, site visiting, advises of experts, and
experience of customers. Since we are able to deal
with the fuzzy nature of input data, the inventory is
not necessarily all quantitative. Semi-quantitative and
qualitative data are also allowed. This makes the
traditionally complex and time-consuming LCC
306
cost
-
Function
E.B.
Fuzzy
Function --r, Multi- Result
Fuzzifier
Product criteria *Dehzzifier
)erformance Assessment
Function
Fuzzv Result
Data Fuzzifier Assessment Interpretation
procedure much easier to perform, and the initial
results are much quicker to obtain. In our inventory,
three categories of data are focused. Cost of material
and energy, environmental burdens, and product
performance. One example inventory is shown in
Table 1.
C. Data fuzzifier
The inventory data discussed above is described in
various ways in which the units may be different.
Some items are described by a linguistic variable.
These data are fed into the data fuzzifier and
transformed to suitable forms of membership
functions to produce fuzzy input values in the
corresponding domain. First, direct-rating procedure
[Lootsma, 19991 is used to assign performance
grades on a category scale between 1 to 4. The higher
the grade, the better the corresponding performance.
Second, the selected membership function is used to
represent the input data under the categorization of
the range of data. For example, consider input data
“consumer price”. The respective grades 1 to 4 stands
for “exorbitant, expensive, fair, cheap”. Fig. 3
illustrate the membership function, the range of input
data, and the category of rating. Suppose that the
Fig. 3. Price membership function.
price for one model of camera is $750, then the
fuzzified value of consumer price is (2, 0.7) or (1,
0.3). This means that the price is expensive with
membership value of 0.7, and the price is exorbitant
with membership value of 0.3, as calculated based on
Fig. 3. Because the higher the membership value, the
more precise the fuzzy value reflects the real
situation, we choose the fuzzy value with higher
membership value. In case of two fuzzy values with
same membership value, the higher fuzzy value is
adopted as the inventory data. In this case, (2, 0.7) is
adopted as the fuzzified value of consumer price.
This fuzzifier procedure should be performed for all
inventory data under each criteria.
D. Fuzzy multi-criteria assessment
In this part, fuzzy multi-criteria assessment is
conducted based on the k z y input data produced in
the data fuzzifier. The weighted additive model [Lai
and Hwang, 19 941 is used to aggregate priorities of
the considered fuzzy criteria. The basic concept is to
use a single utility function to express the overall
preference index. The relative weights are provided
for all criteria. The weights can be crisp or fuzzy. In
our case, we use crisp weights with a linear utility
function. The so called fuzzy achievement function is
obtained by multiplying each fuzzy value by their
corresponding weights and then adding the results
together. For Example, for one product model Pi,the
weight for criteria j is wj, the fuzzy value for this
criteria is K, pj), then the fuzzy achevement
function is
where n is number of items considered, and Fiis the
final score for product i.
E. Result interpretation
307
A final achievement for each product model is
obtained by applying fuzzy multi-criteria model. This
score is also in the scale of 1 to 4, representing the
overall performance value “poor, fair, good, and
excellent”. By this score, the performance of products
can be compared in terms of cost, quality, and
environmental impact.
III.Case Studies: Comparison of Film Cameras
and Digital Cameras
Collection of the inventory data is a very important
step in fuzzy logic-based lifecycle assessment. The
accuracy of the data determines the certainty of the
assessment result. Nlkon film cameras and digital
cameras are selected as examples for this case study.
The accurate collection of the data is difficult in this
stage. The results are more significant from the point
of demonstrating the assessment methods than
judging the merits of the cameras cited here. Because
we only consider cameras used for home, we thlnk
that a camera is exorbitant if its consumer price is
higher than $900. The inventory data for consumer
price of the film cameras are collected from the
website of www.amazon.com. Inventory data for
consumer price of the digital ,cameras can be
referenced from [Grotta and Grotta, 19991. Energy
consumption considers the energy consumed in
processing the material for malung the camera.
Material cost is the cost for purchasing the material
for producing the camera. Suppose that one roll of
film per month is used for taking pictures. Total 12
rolls are used for a year. One roll contains 24
exposures. Average cost of one roll film is about $4.5
and processing fee is about $5.5, resulting meha
material cost for film cameras $120. The package for
the film, film itself and photopaper finally become
solid waste. Solid waste that each roll of film
generates is about 100 gram Thus total 1200 gram per
year of solid waste is generated. During the film
processing, some chemicals are used. The chemical
waste per year is estimated about 300 gram. For
digital camera, solid waste is generated only when
you want to print your pictures. The same number of
pictures are taken by DC, resulting total 288 pictures
in a year. Suppose that 20% of pictures taken by DC
are printed, resulting 78 printouts. These printouts
fiially become solid waste and its amount is about
320 gram. No chemical waste for digital cameras. We
scale picture quality into six levels 1 (very poor), 2
(poor), 3 (fair), 4 (good), 5 (very good) and 6
(excellent). The inventory data for DC and FC are
listed in Table 2. These data are fuzzified according
to their membership function shown in Fig. 4. The
fuzzified data are listed in Table 2 by their
corresponding inventory data.
The weight for production material cost is assigned
0.1, energy 0.1, consumer price 0.15, media material
cost 0.15, solid waste 0.15, chemical waste 0.15,
picture quality 0.1 and recyclability 0.1. The final'
scores are 2.703, 2.848, 2.747, 3.156, 3.165, and
3.074 for Nikon 500, Nikon FMlOKit, Nlkon N60
SLR, Nikon Coolpix 800, Nlkon Coolpix 900 and
Nikon Coolpix 900, respectively, according to
formula (1). They can be interpreted as between fair
and good for film camaras, and between good and
excellent for digital cameras. We pay equal attention

'"t '"t

20 40 60 80 100 120 5 10 15 20 25 30
(a) Camera material cost (b) Energy consumption

40 80 120 160 180 200 100 200 350 500 700 900
(c) Media material cost per year (d) Consumer cost

0.3 0.5 0.7 0.9 1.1 1.3

(ILg) 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6
(e) Solid waste per year (f) Chemical release per year

pt p+

' 1 2 3 4 5 6 10 25 40 65 80 95
(g) Picture quality (h) Recyclability

Fig. 4. Membership functions of considered criteria

308
to consumer price, media material cost, solid waste
and chemical waste by assigning the same weight
0.15. These numbers show that although consumer
price of digital cameras is much more expensive than
film cameras, the comprehensive scores of digital
cameras are better than film cameras if the whole
lifecycle of the cameras is considered and almost
even weights are assigned to all the eight input data
items. Clearly, different weight factors may result in
different assessment results.

Table 2. Inventory data for Nikon cameras and their final scores
FC DC
Criteria Unit 500 IFMlOKit I
N60 SLR Coolpix1 1
Coolpix I Coolpix
800 900 950
Production $ 36 (3,0.6) 45 (3, 1) 48 (3,l) 55 (3, 1) 60 (3, 1) 65 (3,O.g)
material
Energy Kwh 15(3, 1) 16 (3,0.8) 18 (2,0.7) 20 (2, 1) 20 (2,l) 21 (2, 1)
Consumer price $ 180 (3,O.g) 250 (3,l) 300 (3,l) 700 (2,l) 800(2, 0.5) 900 (1, 1)
Media material $ 120 (3,l) 120 (3,l) 120 (3,l) 0 (4,l) 0 (4,l) 0 (4,l)
Solid waste Kg 1.2 (2,0.5) 1.2 (2,OS) 1.2 (2,0.5) 0.32 (4,023) 0.32 (4,O.g) 0.32 (4,O.g)
Chemical release Kg 0.3 (3,l) 0.3 (3,l) 0.3 (3,l) 0 (4,l) 0 (4,l) 0 (4,l)
Picture quality Fair (2,0.9) Good (3,0.5) Good (3,0.9) Fair (2,0.6) Good (2,0.8) Good (3,0.6)
Recyclability % 45 (2,0.8) 45 (2,O.g) 45 (2,O.g) 55 (3,O.g) 55 (3,O.g) 55 (3,0.8)
Final score 2.703 2.848 2.747 3.156 3.165 3.074

VI. Conclusion Systems, Man, and Cybernetics, Vol. 28, No.4,

A fuzzy logic-based lifecycle assessment (LCA)
model is presented in this paper. The model considers
criteria of environmental, recycling, together with
cost, quality, reliability and performance variables,
and covers a product lifecycle from material
procurement, manufacturing, usage to disposal.
Economic inventory, physical value, dimensionless
indicator and qualitative measure can be successfully
modeled using the proposed member functions and
combined to derive easily understandable assessment
results. An interesting comparison of digital cameras
(DC) and film cameras (FC) is performed by
applying this method. Energy consumption, media
material consumption, solid waste, chemical wastes,
fluid waste, and recyclability are eight important
factors that are taken into consideration for
evaluating the environmental impacts of DC and FC.
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