ABSTRACT
The growing use of natural fiber reinforced polymer composites instead of synthetic fiber composites may provide even several long-term benefits to the overall sustainability, cleaner production theme, and infrastructure management. The growing interest in long-term sustainability, in addition to the awareness of environmental issues, the proper utilization of natural resources by new environmental regulations has been stressed. Life cycle assessments are used for assessing the environmental features as well as potential impacts associated with a product, by gathering an inventory of related inputs and outputs of a product system and evaluating the possible environmental impacts related with those inputs and outputs. Natural fiber composites have higher fiber content of that of glass fiber composites at an equivalent performance, reducing more polluting base polymer contents. For automotive applications, all of the composites' weight, thermal properties, occupational health and safety, and acoustic insulation properties have to be considered.
