We helped B’ZEOS compare the environmental impact of their seaweed packaging solution by analyzing the cradle to grave impact of their product and compare it with other biobased and fossil fuel based solutions on the market. Project completed October 2024.B'ZEOS wanted to know how their product design performed against their competitors and know more about how the choice of input materials affected the overall environmental impact of their product.
The study constituted a prospective LCA of a packaging solution currently under development by the company, produced from seaweed extracts. This was then compared, on a cradle-to-grave basis, to equivalent products based on other petrochemical and bio-based materials available on the market. The results allowed B’ZEOS to not only benchmark the environmental performance of their product against potential competitors, but also to gain insights as to how to improve this performance regarding aspects such as product design, choice of raw materials and implications in terms of product disposal at the end of its useful life.
This project entails a detailed cradle-to-grave life cycle assessment (LCA) of individual product portfolios and production lines for recycling of slaughter by-products and organic residues at SARIA across their European network of operations.
The life cycle framework allows for a quantitative assessment of the environmental impact associated with all stages of a product’s life. For all product portfolios the environmental impact of SARIA’s treatment of different slaughter by-products and organic residues are calculated.
A user-friendly SARIA Excel LCA tool was also developed, consisting of:
The purpose of the SARIA LCA Excel Tool is to allow an automation of the LCA, enabling strategic decision makings and actions to improve their footprint:
A regionalized life cycle inventory model to account for human excretion of food products is presented, constituting an update of a previous model published by the author in 2008.
The updated model provides country-specific estimates on toilet activities (use of toilet paper, tap water, soap) and wastewater/excreta management, the latter addressing not only wastewater collection and treatment as done in developed countries, but also decentralized options such as septic tanks, latrines, and open defecation. The model currently supports inventories for 92 countries, linked to the ecoinvent database. The model is tested here with three products (banana, breadcrumbs, cheese) in five countries (Bangladesh, Denmark, Niger, Israel, USA), where the results for human excretion, per kg food ingested, are compared to food production in terms of global warming and aquatic eutrophication.
The results show that besides a wide geographical variability, the environmental impacts of sanitation linked to food consumption have a higher magnitude than previously anticipated. In global warming, human excretion impacts can be of similar and even higher magnitude than food production, as far as products with a low carbon footprint are concerned, such as bananas. This relevance decreases for products with a higher carbon footprint such as cheese. Regarding aquatic eutrophication, the results suggest a potentially high relevance for human excretion in countries with poor sanitation, while the opposite holds true in countries with advanced treatment of wastewaters.
We stress the importance of including human excretion in LCA studies of food products, especially when the goal is to identify life cycle hotspots or to assess dietary shifts.
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The Danish Ministry of Defense initiated this project to produce an environmental account includes upstream emissions from the Ministry of Defense's purchases of goods and services, direct emissions from combustion of fuels in vehicles, machinery etc., as well as downstream emissions related to waste disposal for the year 2017.
The purpose of the environmental accounts is first and foremost to calculate a baseline for the Ministry of Defence's environmental performance, including providing insight into environmental hot-spots. The environmental accounts should be seen as an initial step towards identifying relevant, strategic focus areas for future environmental work.
Where possible, possible focus areas are identified, but as the primary purpose has been to identify environmental hot-spots and create a baseline. It is recommended to initiate an independent project that sets out scenarios for possible, concrete environmental measures.
This project entails a detailed comparative cradle-to-grave life cycle assessment (LCA) of individual product portfolios and production lines for recycling of organic residues at DAKA.
The life cycle framework allows for a quantitative assessment of the environmental impact associated with all stages of a product’s life. In the current project the product portfolios under study are DAKA’s treatment services of C3 slaughter by-product, C1 and C2 slaughter by-products and fallen stock and food waste.
For all portfolios the environmental impact of DAKA’s treatment of different slaughter by-products and organic residues are calculated. For C3 slaughter by-products, a comparison with energy production (biogas) is also performed. The purpose of analysing all product portfolios is to gain a complete overview of DAKA’s total annual environmental impact.
The project follows the requirements in the international standards for LCA: ISO 14040 (2006) and 14044 (2006). The LCA has been subject to a critical panel review in accordance with the ISO standards on LCA. The study covers a wide range of environmental impacts, including greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, i.e. carbon footprint, nature occupation, respiratory effects, eutrophication etc. The LCA also addresses indirect land use changes (iLUC).
A life cycle assessment (LCA) is conducted on the current refractory waste management practices in a steel works in Spain producing around 6,000 tonnes of refractory waste in 2018. Management practices included direct reuse of spent magnesia-carbon (MgO-C) bricks, recycling of MgO-C bricks and high-alumina refractories by an external contractor and landfilling of monolithics and isostatic refractories, for which there were yet no established valorization routes. This current situation was compared to a hypothetical scenario where all refractories were disposed in landfill. The LCA included waste management activities (collection, transport, treatment) as well as production of substituted primary materials (dead-burned magnesia, calcined bauxite and new MgO-C bricks) produced in China and Germany. Results are discussed for four indicators: greenhouse-gas emissions, Non-renewable energy demand, land use and water use. Overall, per tonne of produced waste, the current management leads to a reduction or saving of 0.54 tonnes CO2-eq, 3 GJ primary energy from non-renewable sources, the occupation of 10 m2 of land during one year and the abstraction of 5 m3 freshwater. The results also show that reuse, in the particular case of spent MgO-C bricks, leads to higher benefits than recycling by at least a factor four. The robustness of these results is confirmed through the application of a Monte Carlo uncertainty analysis, as well as a sensitivity analysis focusing on a shift from coal to natural gas in the Chinese refractory industry.
Wastewater reclamation in a petroleum refinery in Turkey was evaluated with life cycle assessment (LCA). The goal of the study was to determine whether or not refinery wastewater reclamation for different industrial purposes, namely boiler feedwater, cooling water and fire water, leads to an overall benefit across different environmental aspects, besides alleviating freshwater resources, when compared to current wastewater disposal practices. The basis for the assessment was the hypothetical scale-up of a demonstration plant tested with real wastewaters from November 2018 to May 2019 at the Izmit petroleum refinery operated by Tüpraş. This demonstration plant consisted of different treatment modules, including dissolved air flotation, ceramic membrane bioreactor, catalytic wet-air oxidation, advanced oxidation with ozone and hydrogen peroxide, and reverse osmosis. The LCA was conducted following consequential modelling principles, and six environmental indicators were analysed in detail at midpoint level: global warming, respiratory inorganics, marine ecotoxicity, aquatic eutrophication, freshwater consumption and non-renewable energy demand. All three reclamation scenarios (boiler, cooling, fire water) succeeded in achieving a life-cycle freshwater saving, of around 1 m3 freshwater saved per m3 refinery wastewater. Beneficial results were also obtained in marine ecotoxicity and aquatic eutrophication, where impact is reduced up to 90% and 84%, respectively. With regard to global warming and non-renewable energy demand, only the boiler feedwater application appeared to involve an improvement over wastewater disposal, showing a net reduction of 2.2 kg CO2-eq and 40 MJ per m3 wastewater, respectively, thanks to potential thermal energy savings. For cooling makeup water and fire water, impacts were between 2 and 2.5 times higher in these two indicators when compared to wastewater disposal. Finally, the indicator on respiratory inorganic effects, showed higher impact, by a factor 2 to 7, for all reuse scenarios, due to electricity demand, which is linked to the Turkish electricity production mix with a substantial contribution from coal power plants. Thus, the results reflect that achieving a product water of very high quality comes at the price of a high energy demand. Nevertheless, A sensitivity analysis shows that the environmental performance of all scenarios would improve to a great extent when shifting to an electricity mix with a higher share of renewables, as is the current trend in most European countries.
The main objective of the LIFE-REthinkWASTE project is to endow municipalities with a “plug and play” governance scheme based on the PAYT (Pay As You Throw) and KAYT (Know As You Throw) paradigms to increase waste separation, reduce waste generation, and increase the effective recovery rates, whilst simultaneously reducing the average household waste bill. This objective will be tackled by adapting and re-addressing the waste management plans and other management/normative drivers (e.g., regulations, financial plans, and service contracts) according to a new paradigm in urban waste policy fares based on a combined approach of PAYT (supported by big data) and KAYT, and inspired by a novel social innovation approach.
A summary of the main results is available in this poster.
Due to increased policy attention on circular economy strategies, many studies have quantified material use and recovery at national and global scales. However, there has been no quantitative analysis of the unrecovered waste that can be potentially reintegrated into the economy as materials or products. This can be interpreted as the gap of material circularity. In this paper we define the circularity gap of a country as the generated waste, plus old materials removed from stocks and durable products disposed (i.e. stock depletion), minus recovered waste. We estimated the circularity gap of 43 nations and 5 rest of the world regions in 2011, using the global, multiregional hybrid-units input-output database EXIOBASE v3.3. Our results show the trends of circularity gap in accordance to each region. For example, the circularity gaps of Europe and North America were between 1.6–2.2 tonnes per capita (t/cap), which are more than twice the global average gap (0.8 t/cap). Although these regions presented the major amount of material recovery, their circularity gaps were mostly related to the levels of stock depletion. In Africa and Asia-Pacific regions, the circularity gap was characterized by a low degree of recovery and stock depletion, with high levels of generated waste. Moreover, we discuss which intervention types can be implemented to minimize the circularity gap of nations.
The management of ladle refractory material waste in European Steelworks currently has no consistent Best Available Technology (BAT), with most of it being dumped in landfills. At the same time all steelmakers are worried about ladle refractory costs and risks but the improvements are achieved based on partial assumptions or trial and error. This Circular Economy Project answers to this situation based on a "4R" model, combining waste reduction by means of monitoring and optimizing the ladle refractory consumption (via remaining brick thickness) with processes for Reusing/Remanufacturing and Recycling the ladle refractory brick waste. The final optimized application will come from an expert decision tree and accompanied by the corresponding LCA studies. This innovative approach and knowledge aims to be totally transferable to other steel companies with both significant environmental and economic benefits.
