Modelling material recycling in life cycle assessment: how sensitive are results to the available methods?
Book chapter, 2020

In open-loop recycling, material is recycled from one product into another. Life cycle assessment quantifies the environmental impacts of a single product. This requires understanding to what extent the primary production, the recycling, and the waste management activities belong to or affect the two product systems involved: the product that provides the material for recycling or the product produced from recycled material. The challenge is to identify how much each of the products contribute to the environmental benefit of recycling, i.e., to the avoided primary production and waste management. We describe and review many of the available methods for modelling material recycling and conclude that results can be very sensitive to the method adopted. More research is required to decide what method is the most accurate. There is also a trade-off between feasibility and accurate representation of the consequences of recycling. This implies that different methods can be applicable depending on the importance of the material recycling.

Life Cycle Assessment

Allocation

Recycling

Author

Tomas Ekvall

Chalmers, Technology Management and Economics, Environmental Systems Analysis

Miguel Brandão

Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)

Handbook of the Circular Economy

116-136
9781788972727 (ISBN)

Modeling of recycling

Swedish Energy Agency (47270-1), 2019-01-01 -- 2020-05-31.

Driving Forces

Sustainable development

Areas of Advance

Production

Subject Categories

Other Environmental Engineering

Environmental Management

Environmental Sciences

DOI

10.4337/9781788972727

More information

Latest update

8/29/2022