LCA of zinc phosphating and thin film pre-treatment.
The project Closing the loop of industrial plastic aims to increase the circular use of materials from industrial plastic packaging through closed loop recycling. Within this project, a study has been made where the goal was to compare the climate change impact of four different scenarios for three case studies.
The four main scenarios are Closed loop recycling, Closed and open loop recycling, Open loop recycling, and Incineration and the three case studies included in the study are Packaging made of expanded polystyrene (EPS), big bags made of polypropylene (PP) and film made of low-density polyethylene (LDPE).
For all three case studies, the main conclusion is that the climate impact is lower for closed loop recycling than for all three alternatives mentioned above. Additionally, the study identifies the second-best option as a mix of Closed and open loop recycling, followed by Open loop recycling, and finally, Incineration.
The idea of leveraging the Internet of Things (IoT) to support strategies in line with the circular economy (CE) has been gaining traction in literature. However, previous work has predominantly focused on the opportunities that these technologies can bring, and few studies have critically assessed the environmental viability of the proposed strategies. In this study, we assess the net environmental impact of IoT-enabled circular strategies in the specific case of truck tires in the Swedish context, in order to gain insight into when and how it makes environmental sense to embed IoT hardware into products to support circular strategies. We quantify (1) the potential environmental savings in the different life cycle phases made possible through access to sensor data, and (2) the environmental impact from the added technology needed to provide and process the data. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is used to evaluate the difference in impact between the current state and an ‘IoT scenario’. We find that the IoT scenario gives a 4% lower weighted life cycle impact than the current state. Through sensitivity analysis, we show that the conclusions are sensitive to assumptions made about the expected benefits of adding IoT, which depend on the technological context as well as the current and IoT-induced behavior of stakeholders along the product life cycle. The results are also sensitive to assumptions about the environmental impact of the IoT hardware components, implying that design decisions at this level can be important for ensuring a net environmental impact reduction from IoT-enabled circular strategies.