LCA and communication: Environmental Product Declaration

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Life Cycle Assessment of ship recycling: metals recovery

In 2010 the International Maritime Organization (IMO) reported that more than 100.000 ships where operating world wide for people and goods transport. (Maritime Knowledge Centre, 2011). This huge number of ships need to be dismantled at the end of their life cycle. Thus, during the last decade, concerns about the environmental costs of ship breaking activity start to develop around science and policy makers, (Hiremath et al., 2015). Ship recycling help in recovering great numbers of materials and valuables, such as, machineries, household accessories, plastic, glass and most of all metals. Ship recycling industry can be considered Sustainable and participant to the circular economy principles, as almost the whole ship products can be reused, recycled and resold, (Sarraf et al., 2010). Although the great economic and environmental benefits originate by ship recycling; barriers still exist within the current system, (Choi et al., 2016). Policies have been promoted by many international authorities, such as the United Nations, to address the issue related to ship breaking, (Chang et al., 2010). In 2009, the Hong Kong Convention (HKC), (IMO, 2013) and in 2013 the European Union, with the “Ship Recycling Regulation” (EU, 2013), regulated the ship recycling, ensuring that ships, during their end of life phase, do not pose any risks to human, and developed authorization of ship recycling facilities and safe and environmentally sound recycling of ship, (Hiremath et al., 2016). The night of the 13 January 2012 the cruise ship Concordia shipwrecked near the Giglio Island in the Mediterranean sea. The Concordia wreck have been processed in accordance with the previously presented policies, and given the size and the uniqueness represents an important case study for many and multidisciplinary studies. Giving the fact that more than 95% of ship weight is represented by steel and metal scrap, (Deshpande et al., 2013), this study evaluates the environmental burdens of the operations for metals recycling with a Life cycle assessment methodology. The assessment is developed as a comparison between conventional metal production and metals recycled from the cruise ship. Five different metal waste flows, are investigated, taking into account all the operations for the dismantling of the materials, their transport to the different recycling facility and the transformation of the metal scraps in recycled metals. The same analysis was done for the traditional metals (Figure 1). Acidification, eutrophication, climate change and energy requirement are the impact categories evaluated. Moreover, an economic analysis of the traditional metals and the recycled metals is carried out. Results show that recycled metals from the wrecked cruise ship have an overall better environmental score than the conventional ones. However, in the light of the results of this study, metal scrap recycling induce significant environmental impacts, especially in the climate change category, where the separation from impurity process results as highly incisive in the generation of green house gasses Please click Additional Files below to see the full abstract

A CRITICAL ENVIRONMENTAL ANALYSIS OF STRATEGIC MATERIALS TOWARDS ENERGY TRANSITION

Global consumption of materials is rising rapidly leading to an increase in environmental impacts associated with the supply chain. Similar issues also affect a set of materials strategic for the transition towards a sustainable energy production and distribution system: i.e. materials employed in renewable energy (wind turbines and photovoltaic panels), energy storage, electrolysers, electricity distribution networks and electric vehicle charging infrastructure. The analysis identifies, maps and de-fines a priority hierarchy for the environmental risks generated along the life-cycle of strategic raw materials. Standard construction material such as iron, steel and concrete showed the lowest environmental risks whereas platinum and iridium presented by far the highest impacts (respectively about 24.100 and 14.700 kg CO2 eq, 354.000 and 216.000 MJ, and 140 and 83 m3 of water for 1 kg of raw material). Recycled materials have shown to enable the lowering of the environmental risk associated with some raw material production processes (i.e. copper, lead, aluminium, nickel, manganese), whereas specific materials (i.e. platinum, iridium, indium, dysprosium) and related applications will need to be monitored to guarantee a sustainable transition towards renewable energies

Monitoring of carbon dioxide uptake in accelerated carbonation processes applied to air pollution control residues

The application of Accelerated Carbonation Technology (ACT) has potential for the sequestration of carbon in waste and geological materials. ACT also has potential to be supported by carbon credit mechanisms based upon the amount of carbon sequestered from industrial emissions. For this to happen, the routine monitoring of CO2 sequestered into the solid phase is required for the planning and operation of any accelerated carbonation plant. The present paper reports the preliminary results from an assessment of existing methods for measuring CO2 imbibed into a solid by an accelerated carbonation processes. Laboratory-scale experiments were carried out to evaluate the accuracy of methodologies for measuring mineralised carbon including: loss on ignition, acid digestion and total carbon analysis. The CO2 reactivity of several wastes from municipal incineration known as Air Pollution Control residues (APCr) were also included in the study. A detailed characterisation of the materials being carbonated, using X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray fluorescence (XRF), thermogravimetric analysis (TGA) and ion chromatography was carried out. The results of this study showed that monitoring CO2 during accelerated carbonation is made difficult by the complex mineralogy of materials such as APCrs. As such, the presence of calcium bearing species and polymorphs of calcium carbonate formed varied between the materials investigated. The use of an acid digestion technique was not subject to interference from the chemistry or mineralogy of an ash. Among the investigated methods, acid digestion gives the most promising results as it provided robust data on the amount of carbon imbibed during processing

Inverse Estimation of Temperature Profiles in Landfills Using Heat Recovery Fluids Measurements

In addition to leachate and gas emission analysis, temperature variations in municipal solid waste landfills are routinely monitored for safety and health reasons, such as the increased production of biogas or the danger of spontaneous combustion phenomena if the temperature exceeds 70–75°C. The increasing constraints on greenhouse gas emissions and the convenience of fuel and heat recovery have helped develop a global approach to landfills' operation and maintenance, generally referred to as bioreactor landfill management. The heat recovery piping we are presently designing can be a significant part of this approach. The heat gained by a fluid circulated in a closed network through the landfill is transferred to an external heat exchanger or used directly as warm water. Additionally, it can help reduce landfill temperature levels and control biogas generation. Since the pipes diameter is large enough to allow for a radial temperature gradient, this information can be used for an inverse estimation of the temperature profile in the landfill which constitutes the boundary conditions of the resulting heat transfer problem. In this paper, we describe an algorithm for regularising the resulting ill-posed free boundary estimation problem using sampled data of the heat recovery fluid on exiting the landfill

Life Cycle Assessment of a Circular Economy Process for Tray Production via Water-Based Upcycling of Vegetable Waste

With one-third of food being wasted at the various steps of the value chain, there is a large amount of biomass constantly being discarded, also wasting the resources consumed for its production. Several strategies have been proposed to use this biomass as a source of raw materials for the production of plastic alternatives, but the environmental impact parameters have rarely been estimated to understand if the proposed process provides an overall benefit. The purpose of this paper is to analyze, through an experimental laboratory campaign, the production process of a vegetable biocomposite material obtained by valorization of biomass from two sources: unsold vegetables from a wholesale market and carrot pomace obtained as a byproduct of juicing. The obtained biocomposite films were thermoformed into trays to replace the traditional plastic food containers made principally with PET. Different scenarios for the lab-scale production of trays were evaluated by testing two water-based processing methods for the two types of biomass used. In order to understand which of the four scenarios was the least impactful, the global warming potential, the cumulative energy demand, and the water scarcity index were used as indicators. Among the different lab-scale processing scenarios for the upscaling of vegetable waste, the least impactful was starting from the unsold/discarded vegetables collected at the wholesale market that were processed via water-based hydrolysis catalyzed by formic acid. Impact parameters were comparable or better than two traditional polymers (PET and HDPE) and two biopolymers (PLA and biopolymer from starch), showing that this process has excellent potential, from an environmental point of view, of substituting plastic packaging

Environmental assessment of vegetable crops towards the water-energy-food nexus: A combination of precision agriculture and life cycle assessment

The increase in world population and the resulting demand for food, water and energy are exerting increasing pressure on soil, water resources and ecosystems. Identification of tools to minimise the related environmental impacts within the food–energy–water nexus is, therefore, crucial. The purpose of the study is to carry out an analysis of the agri-food sector in order to improve the energy-environmental performance of four vegetable crops (beans, peas, sweet corn, tomato) through a combination of precision agriculture (PA) and life cycle assessment (LCA). Thus, PA strategies were identified and a full LCA was performed on actual and future scenarios for all crops in order to evaluate the benefits of a potential combination of these two tools. In the case study analysed, a life cycle approach was able to target water consumption as a key parameter for the reduced water availability of future climate scenarios and to set a multi-objective function combining also such environmental aspects to the original goal of yield maximisation. As a result, the combination of PA with the LCA perspective potentially allowed the path for an optimal trade-off of all the parameters involved and an overall reduction of the expected environmental impacts in future climate scenarios

Robot Pose Nowcasting: Forecast the Future to Improve the Present

In recent years, the effective and safe collaboration between humans and machines has gained significant importance, particularly in the Industry 4.0 scenario. A critical prerequisite for realizing this collaborative paradigm is precisely understanding the robot's 3D pose within its environment. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel vision-based system leveraging depth data to accurately establish the 3D locations of robotic joints. Specifically, we prove the ability of the proposed system to enhance its current pose estimation accuracy by jointly learning to forecast future poses. Indeed, we introduce the concept of Pose Nowcasting, denoting the capability of a system to exploit the learned knowledge of the future to improve the estimation of the present. The experimental evaluation is conducted on two different datasets, providing state-of-the-art and real-time performance and confirming the validity of the proposed method on both the robotic and human scenarios

Life cycle assessment of hydrogen-powered city buses in the High V.LO-City project: integrating vehicle operation and refuelling infrastructure

During the project High V.LO-City, which ended in December 2019, 14 hydrogen fuel cell buses were operated in four European cities. This paper aims at presenting total emissions through the lifetime of fuel cell buses with different hydrogen production options, including the refuelling stations. The environmental assessment of such bus system is carried out using the life cycle assessment methodology. Three hydrogen production pathways are investigated: water electrolysis, chlor-alkali electrolysis and steam methane reforming. Fuel economy during bus operation is around 10.25 KgH2/100 km, and the refuelling station energy demand ranges between 7 and 9 KWh/KgH2. To support the inventory stage, dedicated software tools were developed for collecting and processing a huge amount of bus data and refuelling station performance, for automating data entry and for impacts calculation. The results show that hydrogen-powered buses, compared to a diesel bus, have the potential to reduce emissions during the use phase, if renewables resources are used. On the other hand, impacts from the vehicle production, including battery pack and fuel cell stack, still dominate environmental load. Consequently, improving the emission profile of fuel cell bus system requires to promote clean electricity sources to supply a low-carbon hydrogen and to sharpen policy focus regarding life cycle management and to counter potential setbacks, in particular those related to problem shifting and to grid improvement. For hazardous emissions and resource use, the high energy intensity of mining and refining activities still poses challenges on how to further enhance the environmental advantages of fuel cells and battery packs

Investigation on the TransientConditions of a Rotating Biological Contactor for Bioethanol Production

Alcoholic fermentations of sucrose solutions were performed in a Rotating BiologicalContactor with immobilized-yeast cells, and the results collected during the transient conditions of start-up are presented and discussed. The analysis and modeling of data constitute a preliminary semi-empirical approach to the study of dynamics of such a bioprocess. The investigation has been developed on the observations of the responses to variations in the operating conditions of substrate, product, suspended- and immobilized- cell concentrations either in the fermentation broth or within a synthetic spongy matrix