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Critical review on life cycle assessment of bio-based platform molecules: sustainability metrics of novel technologies
Get PDFBio-based platform chemicals are a set of compounds identified as key for biorefineries development [1]. Their penetration into the current market would sustain the shifting towards a more sustainable circular bioeconomy. Specifically, their biological origin can reduce both petroleum dependency and waste landfilling. Although this constitutes a promising scenario, incumbent technologies are hampered by intrinsic difficulties mainly related to upstream processing and the complex biomass composition. In this sense, life cycle assessment (LCA) is a fundamental tool to identify hotspots and ensure environmental improvements against conventional petroleum-based processes. Even though the number of LCAs published on biochemicals has rapidly grown, comparison between them is still limited due to the heterogeneous methodological choices applied
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An alternative management scheme for plastics from construction & demolition waste
Get PDFConstruction and Demolition Waste (C&DW) is a priority stream in the circular economy agenda, since it accounts for more than a third of all wastes generated in the European Union. About 1.8 Mt/y of these C&DW are plastics, whose valorisation has to overcome several obstacles: i) Current legislation recycling targets are established in terms of total recycled mass (Iodice et al., 2021), hence can be easier obtained by focusing on heavy fractions, i.e. metals and inert materials; ii) Plastics in buildings are often embedded behind walls, under floors and inside roofs: this complicates their gathering and separation (EC, 2021); iii) C&DW plastics often contain substances of concerns, allowed in the past but restricted by the current legislation (Wagner and Schlummer, 2020): the long lifetime of plastics in buildings - from about 15 years up to, sometimes, 100 years – it is thus a further technical obstacle for recycling; iv) Recycling entails high costs and needs specific policy actions to be implemented, such as landfill ban and the creation of a competitive market for secondary raw material (Pantini and Rigamonti, 2020). These constrains make collection and management schemes complex and variable from country to country. Moreover, the rare utilisation of a selective demolition as alternative to a conventional demolition further worsens the quality of recoverable materials.
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Critical review on life cycle assessment of bio‐based platform molecules: sustainability metrics of novel technologies
Get PDFBio-based platform chemicals are a set of compounds identified as key for biorefineries development [1]. Their penetration into the current market would sustain the shifting towards a more sustainable circular bioeconomy. Specifically, their biological origin can reduce both petroleum dependency and waste landfilling. Although this constitutes a promising scenario, incumbent technologies are hampered by intrinsic difficulties mainly related to upstream processing and the complex biomass composition. In this sense, life cycle assessment (LCA) is a fundamental tool to identify hotspots and ensure environmental improvements against conventional petroleumbased processes. Even though the number of LCAs published on biochemicals has rapidly grown, comparison between them is still limited due to the heterogeneous methodological choices applied.
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The Biofactory: Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment for Promoting Circular Economies in Wastewater TreatmentMadeline Furness, University of Canterbury, United Kingdom
Get PDFThe concept of the circular economy offers an opportunity for wastewater to be utilized as a valuable resource within the food-water-energy nexus, opposed to the current environmental burden it poses. Recently, many promising wastewater technologies for recovering resources and improving effluent quality have been developed and implemented across the world. The most effective technologies recover biogas and biosolids through the anaerobic digestion of sludge, along with advanced removal of nutrients from water.
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Environmental and economic sustainability of agricultural waste collection and valorization
Get PDFToday it is estimated that 20% of the food produced in Europe is wasted (ASVIS, 2021). In particular, about 14% of food is globally lost after the harvesting phase, before reaching the retailing one, during operations carried out on farms or during storage and transport (Food and Agricultural Organisation, 2019). The causes are various such as unsuitable techniques and equipment, poor management skills, bad weather conditions or excess of stocks. This situation is certainly not in line with the Sustainable Development Goals signed by the United Nations in the 2030 Agenda and several actions to reduce waste should be taken yet (United Nations Development Programme, 2022). What could be the solutions? To answer this question, this study aims at carrying out a review of the possible strategies and technologies to reduce food wastage in agriculture or to valorise wasted raw materials taking into account the industrial technical feasibility and their environmental impact. The Scopus scientific database is used to perform the analysis, identifying articles and reviews published in English around the world in recent years, related both to pilot plants and industrial applications. A literature analysis has been firstly carried out to verify whether this issue has gained interest over the years, which are the main sources of publication and the main authors of research on food waste reduction and valorisation, always by considering only the agriculture and post harvested phases. Then, the main methodologies and strategies adopted in recent years, or under development today, to enhance food waste will be presented, deepening their characteristics, applications, advantages and disadvantages. The results of the review will be useful not only for researchers or companies to get an overview of the available technologies, but also for municipalities, for example, to understand which choices are the most sustainable from an environmental and economic point of view.
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Potential Circularity of Plastic in Europe – Dynamic MFA of PET, PE & PP Flows
Get PDFPlastic is an indispensable material in modern society, due to its many attractive properties, such as low costs, high durability, and low weight. As a vast majority of plastic is produced from fossil-based resources and thus emits CO2 when managed through incineration, considerable attention has been placed on transitioning towards a circular plastic economy, where plastic waste is recirculated into the production system, often through recycling, thereby avoiding the use of virgin plastic. However, plastic, and plastic waste, are very broad categories including various plastic types, with different chemical properties, as well as plastic products with different intended applications, used in different sectors and thus having varying lifetimes, degree of complexity in the design, contamination from the use phase, etc. All aspects, which affect and complicate the recycling of plastic waste. Hence, to assess accurately the circularity potential of plastic, the assessment modeling itself needs to consider such aspects. The aim of this presentation is to present a study1, in which a dynamic material flow analysis model was used to assess the potential circularity of PET, PE and PP flows in all sectors in Europe. The model covered all PET, PE and PP in Europe (i.e. from production to waste management) over a 50 year period, and included aspects of product life times, expected demand growth, quality reductions during recycling and recycling cascades. Besides a baseline scenario, representing business as usual from 2016 conditions, several scenarios were defined, representing key initiatives for increasing the circularity: i) keeping a constant plastic consumption, ii) no export of plastic waste outside Europe, iii) improving product design and recyclability, iv) improving collection systems and v) improving end-of-life management technology. The circularity was evaluated based on the indicators: recycling rate [%], circular material use rate [%], closed-loop circularity rate [%] and virgin material consumption [Mt], of which only the recycling rate represents a mandatory target within the EU. The outcome of the study showed that a business-as-usual situation leads to conditions that are far from circular, as very low recycling rates (13-20%) and high dependence on virgin plastic intake (85-90%) were demonstrated for the 50-year period. Improving collection systems and collection rates, as well as using stateof- the-art end-of-life management technology, showed the largest potential for circularity improvement as an individual initiative. However, all the individual initiatives were associated with limited potential for improvement. Instead, by combining initiatives, potential recycling rates above 55% could be reached and dependence on virgin intake reduced to 35-60% of the annual demand. Moreover, 75-90% of the plastic waste could potentially be recycled in a closed loop. The virgin material consumption increased dramatically throughout the 50-year period, for all scenarios with an expected increasing plastic demand. Thus, where the size of the expected plastic demand had limited influence on the relative indicators (recycling rate, circular material use rate and closed-loop circularity rate), limiting the growth of the plastic consumption was essential for maintaining a stable virgin material consumption. As the virgin material consumption is directly linked to the environmental impacts of a system and might indeed outbalance the improvements from circularity enhancing initiatives2, it is insufficient to solely focus on relative indicators, such as recycling rates, and even material substitution. When transitioning to a circular economy, also the demand should be stabilized. 1. Eriksen, M. K., Pivnenko, K., Faraca, G., Boldrin, A. & Astrup, T. F. Dynamic Material Flow Analysis of PET, PE, and PP Flows in Europe: Evaluation of the Potential for Circular Economy. Environ. Sci. Technol. (2020). doi:10.1021/acs.est.0c03435 2. Andreasi Bassi, S., Tonini, D., Saveyn, H. & Astrup, T. F. Environmental and Socioeconomic Impacts of Poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) Packaging Management Strategies in the EU. Environ. Sci. Technol. 56, 501–511 (2022).
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Disentangled UHMWPE - Control of crystallization, chain entanglement and rheology via process conditions
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Solubility of multiple gases in amorphous polypropylene
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It’s all about diffusion: Measurements and modeling of particle morphologies in dispersed-phase polymerization
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Bending strength of multi‐layered alumina with controlled residual stress
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