Abstract
Although circular initiatives emerge around the world, the process of decoupling the economic activity from resource consumption and environmental impacts is far of being achieved. The concept of circular economy embodies the opportunity to reconcile an improved resource use while reducing the environmental footprint. Appropriate assessment metrics and methodologies are needed to identify potential trade-off between these 2 sides of a single coin. In this paper, we apply the Material Circularity Indicator (MCI) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) to analyse tires end-of-life strategies aiming at improving the circular flow of all tire materials. Results reveal re-treading is interesting to produce trade-offs on environmental impacts while re-grooving offers a fully decoupled strategy that improves material circularity avoiding environmental burdens. Further improvements should integrate environmental assessment as well as economic factors to link micro scale to macro scale contributions to sustainable development.
Highlights
Decoupling the economic activity from any form of social and ecological degradation is gaining recognition as a universal condition to increase—or at least maintain—social welfare throughout generations (e.g. [1])
We developed a novel bi-dimensional approach to measure the performance of circular economy beyond the sole objective of resource preservation
It allows a straight forward interpretation of Material Circularity Indicator (MCI) and Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) results revealing trade-offs between improved material circularity and the risk of burden shifting over given LCA damages categories
Summary
Decoupling the economic activity from any form of social and ecological degradation is gaining recognition as a universal condition to increase—or at least maintain—social welfare throughout generations (e.g. [1]). We first identify suitable tools to assess both circularities of material flows and environmental burdens and we provide a novel approach to evaluate CE strategies (See Chapter “Sustainability performance evaluation for selecting the Best Recycling Pathway During its Design Phase”). We apply it to a case study on tire end-of-life management to identify trade-offs of CE strategies (See Chapter “A synthesis of optimization approaches for LCA-integrated industrial process modeling: application to potable water production plants”), we discuss some limitations of our approach (See in this Chapter).
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