Life cycle assessment and the willingness to pay of waste polyester recycling

Abstract

As an important approach to recover solid waste, the recycling of waste polyester has drawn a growing level of public concern. This study aims to investigate the life cycle assessment and social cost of life cycle assessment of waste polyester recycling. The results show that the polyester recycling process itself has significant environmental impact on global warming, fossil resource scarcity, human carcinogenic toxicity, water consumption and terrestrial ecotoxicity. Global warming, terrestrial ecotoxicity and land use are the most influential categories of social cost of life cycle assessment, with a contribution of 55.7%, 10.9% and 6.3% respectively. Through key process identification, sensitivity analysis and integrated evaluation study, it is found that electricity generation, direct air emissions and transportation are key processes that affect social cost of life cycle assessment and life cycle assessment. The effects of these key processes on social cost of life cycle assessment are greater than that on life cycle assessment. Consequently, the corresponding optimization measures are proposed in order to improve the sustainability performance of polyester industry.