Abstract
The purpose of this study is to determine the environmental and economic balance between a collection of waste requiring the transport to a centralized recycling plant versus the displacement of a recycling plant near the waste production’s location. Two systems are compared in the study with economic and environmental Life cycle analysis (LCC and LCA) tools. The first one considers a centralized recycling plant that gathers batch of cables from different locations in Europe. The second scenario considers a transportable recycling plant, the Cablebox (designed by MTB Manufacturing), which is regularly carried to be close to the waste deposit to recycle waste cables. On the one hand, the study demonstrates huge environmental benefits for transportable recycling plants in comparison with the centralized system. The overall environmental impact is halved on the climate change indicator. On the other hand, the results show the economic advantages of such solution. The treatment cost per ton of recycling is reduced by 5 to 8%. Transportable recycling solutions seem to be a good answer to solve End-of-Life logistic issues, both from an economic and an environmental point of view.
Highlights
1.1 Context of the studyThe rise of the world’s population and its life conditions go hand in hand with the growth of energy and raw material consumption as well as the steadily growing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere [1,2]
The Life cycle assessment (LCA) revealed that the closed loop option has lower environmental impact over the other recycling scenario using mixed aluminium scraps
Thanks to MTB recycling pathway, on the set of indicators, the environmental impact of recycled aluminium is divided by four. These results allow us to establish a hierarchy between environmental recycling solutions for aluminium cables
Summary
The rise of the world’s population and its life conditions go hand in hand with the growth of energy and raw material consumption as well as the steadily growing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere [1,2]. Life (EoL) strategies, the consumption growth comes by an increase in the amount of waste produced annually [3,4]. The demand for primary resources is not sustainable in the long term [5]. It is vital to find industrial solutions to maintain standards of living equivalent while decoupling resource use and demand [6]. Recycling is inherent in circular economic strategies that is why industrial companies are developing recycling solutions in close loop [8]. The product centric EoL solutions using recycling show
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
