Technical and market substitutability of recycled materials Calculating the environmental benefits of mechanical and chemical recycling of plastic packaging waste

Technical and market substitutability of recycled materials : Calculating the environmental benefits of mechanical and chemical recycling of plastic packaging waste

Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Bibliographische Detailangaben
Veröffentlicht in:Waste management (New York, N.Y.). - 1999. - 152(2022) vom: 15. Okt., Seite 69-79
1. Verfasser: Huysveld, S (VerfasserIn)
Weitere Verfasser: Ragaert, K, Demets, R, Nhu, T T, Civancik-Uslu, D, Kusenberg, M, Van Geem, K M, De Meester, S, Dewulf, J
Format: Online-Aufsatz
Sprache:English
Veröffentlicht: 2022
Zugriff auf das übergeordnete Werk:Waste management (New York, N.Y.)
Schlagworte:Journal Article Chemical recycling Food packaging Life cycle assessment Mechanical Recycling Plastic waste Substitutability Plastics Receptors, Antigen, T-Cell
Beschreibung
Zusammenfassung:Copyright © 2022 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Most plastics are today mechanically recycled (MR), whereas chemical recycling (CR) is an emerging technology. Substitutability of virgin material is vital for their environmental performance assessed through life cycle assessment (LCA). MR faces the reduction in the material's technical quality but also the potential market because legal safety requirements currently eliminate applications such as food packaging. This study presents a data-driven method for quantifying the overall substitutability (OS), composed of technical (TS) and market substitutability (MS). First, this is illustrated for six non-food contact material (non-FCM) applications and three hypothetical future FCM applications from mechanical recyclates, using mechanical property and market data. Then, OS results are used in a comparative LCA of MR and thermochemical recycling (TCR) of several plastic waste fractions in Belgium. For mechanical recyclates, TS results for the studied non-FCM and FCM applications were comparable, but OS results varied between 0.35 and 0.79 for non-FCM applications and between 0.78 and 1 for FCM applications, reflecting the lower MS results for the current situation. Out of nine application scenarios, MR obtained a worse resource consumption and terrestrial acidification impact than CR in six scenarios. MR maintained the lowest global warming impact for all scenarios. This study contributes to an improved understanding of the environmental benefits of MR and TCR. Inclusion of other criteria (e.g. processability, colour, odour) in the quantification of the overall substitutability for MR products should be further investigated, as well as the environmental performance of TCR at industrial scale
Beschreibung:Date Completed 07.09.2022
Date Revised 07.09.2022
published: Print-Electronic
Citation Status MEDLINE
ISSN:1879-2456
DOI:10.1016/j.wasman.2022.08.006