16 research outputs found

    Strategic research and innovation agenda on circular economy

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    CICERONE aims to bring national, regional and local governments together to jointly tackle the circular economy transition needed to reach net-zero carbon emissions and meet the targets set in the Paris Agreement and EU Green Deal. This document represents one of the key outcomes of the project: a Strategic Research & Innovation Agenda (SRIA) for Europe, to support owners and funders of circular economy programmes in aligning priorities and approaching the circular economy transition in a systemic way

    Co-creation process on circular economy monitoring : overview of interactive activities and outcomes ; reflections on the links to the Bellagio Principles

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    The transition to a greener and more circular economy has been a European policy priority for several years. The Circular Economy Action Plan of 2020 underlines the ambition. The following EEA initiatives are meant to support the transition process: - Bellagio Process on circular economy monitoring principles (EPA network); - Enhancement of EEA indicators on circular economy (ETC/WMGE); - Explorative work on novel data streams (FWC); - Co-creation work - knowledge sharing of monitoring experience (ETC/Eionet). The scope of the present task was to report on the co-creation process that was undertaken at the end of 2020. The co-creation process was organised to identify: (i) best practices on monitoring strategies, data sources and target setting; and (ii) areas of circularity measuring and monitoring that remain challenging and require additional investment. The co-creation process partially built on the work done during the Bellagio Process/Initiative which was run in parallel. This ETC report presents and documents the evidence gathered throughout the co- creation process as well as providing a retrospective analysis of the links to the Bellagio Principles

    Forecasting the recycling potential based on waste analysis: A case study for recycling Nd-Fe-B magnets from hard disk drives

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    Recycling of rare earth metals from permanent magnets used in hard disk drives (HDDs) is an intensively investigated scenario. However, the material composition of the waste stream of data storage devices will drastically change over the coming decades because of ongoing replacement of the HDD market by solid state drives (SSD) that do not contain permanent magnets. Limited information is available on the current material composition of data storage devices and even less on how the volume and material composition of these waste streams will evolve. Nonetheless, these data are crucial to evaluate the economic viability and the potential environmental benefits of the envisaged recycling strategies and for the development of well-adjusted recycling technologies that can cope with these evolutions. Therefore, this paper presents an innovative methodology to forecast the recycling potential from both an economic and environmental perspective, while basing the forecasts on waste sampling analysis and taking into consideration the related uncertainties. In the presented case study, this methodology is applied to quantify the potential value recovery and avoided environmental impact in Belgium of recycling Hard Disk Drives (HDDs) and the Neodymium herein contained. For this analysis, a holistic approach is adopted which considers the wide variety of products in which HDDs can be found and the complete recycling chain, including collection, pre- and end-treatment. The results of the presented forecasts indicate that the number of discarded HDDs stagnates after 2013 to approximately 0.145 units per capita per year. In addition, performed analysis demonstrates that automated demanufacturing systems to separate and recycle the neodymium-iron-boron (Nd-Fe-B) voice coil magnet (VCM) are merely profitable today, whereas a sensitivity analysis indicates that the profitability strongly depends on the labor cost, annual capacity and material value.status: publishe
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