Page 129 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

3.3 Allocation 113

The treatment of secondary raw materials often implies environmental loads and
must be examined individually. By no means is recycling a priori more environ-
mentally friendly than an adequate waste disposal, for example, by incineration
where the energy is used for steam production, heating, and/or power generation.
Also down cycling usually relates to recycling as secondary raw materials (B, C, … )
often prove to be of lower quality than the appropriate primary ones or they may
have to be cleaned or otherwise improved with a surplus of energy and material. 112)
It often makes sense to assess quality losses directly. Thus for the production of a
defined cardboard quality often more waste paper fibre, compared to primary fibre,
is needed. All these processes are accessible to LCA, which therefore can serve as a
decision guideline.

3.3.4.4 OverallLoadtoSystemB
A further rule (rule 3) 113) defines as load of B the environmental loads of primary
raw materials, if B were exclusively produced from these. The delivering system
will get the same amount as bonus, so that all loads will remain in B. In the sense of
a cycle economy this appears unfair, because only the manufacturer of secondary
material will be ‘rewarded’, not, however, the customer. Here again system B must
be known in detail. If B also supplies secondary raw material it can be subtracted.
There is no double counting. All in all: though rule 3 is mathematically correct, it
is ‘unfair’ in the sense of circle economy, for the user of secondary raw materials.
In the case of metals as a classical group of recyclable materials, there is already a
healthy market of high quality secondary raw materials. It has been argued that in
this case the actors of system A have to be motivated to provide their waste (scrap)
for recycling 114) rather than the users. Rule 3 can contribute to such an incentive,
if justified.
An optimised recycle factor regarding environmental aspects can be calcu-
lated according to an ecological break-even point by Fleischer. 115) According to
advancement by Schmidt 116) it can also be dynamically calculated by the inclusion
of increasing environmental burdens (in exceptional cases decreasing) due to
increasing recycling rates into the calculation.

3.3.5
Allocation within Waste-LCAs

A complete LCA is conducted ‘cradle to grave’, where the ‘grave’ is called end-of-life
phase (EOL). This phase can be implemented as recycling (CLR or OLR) or by the
different conventional garbage disposal procedures mostly by waste incineration
and disposal sites. An EOL phase is part of most LCAs except the product enters
during use into an environmental medium. Thus, detergents reach the purification

112) Huppes and Schneider, 1994.
113) Fleischer, 1993; Kl¨ opffer, 1996a.
114) Atherton, 2007.
115) Fleischer, 1993.
116) Schmidt, 1997.