Download Waste Reduction, Recycling and Climate Change

Waste Reduction, Recycling
and Climate Change
The use of the Life Cycle Analysis tool WRATE
Dr Peter Olsen
Scottish Environment Protection Agency
UCCCfS: Climate Change Action Plans – Planning & Implementation
Dundee College
Dundee 11th May 2009
Life Cycle Assessment
 Life cycle assessment
(LCA) is a methodology
for assessing the
potential environmental
impacts of a product or
service across its entire
life cycle, or cradle to
grave
It’s
Life Cycle Assessment
LCA
 Using LCA has many
advantages:
 Often its an ‘eye
opener’, providing an
insight into systems and
their alternatives
 It can confirm expected
environmental impacts
and reveal completely
unexpected impact
LCA
 However, the results
of LCA should not
be used in isolation
to decide on one
option over another
 LCA is one of many
decision-support
tools.
LCA
 It is also necessary to consider economic and
social factors, as well as those environmental
factors that cannot be quantified using LCA
WRATE
 The software SEPA use to undertake the LCA
of waste management options is called
WRATE (Waste and Resource Assessment
Tool for the Environment). WRATE was
developed for the Environment Agency to
replace the tool used to assess the Area
Waste Plans when they were first developed,
WISARD
WRATE
 LCA of waste
management systems is
different from a product
LCA, in that the cradleto-grave approach is
applied only to the
waste management
infrastructure.
WRATE
Product A
Product A
Product B
Product C
Product D
Extraction of
Raw Materials
Extraction of
Raw Materials
Extraction of
Raw Materials
Extraction of
Raw Materials
Extraction of
Raw Materials
Transport
Transport
Transport
Transport
Transport
Manufacturing
Manufacturing
Manufacturing
Manufacturing
Manufacturing
Use
Use
Use
Use
Use
End of Life
End of Life
End of Life
End of Life
End of Life
System
Boundary for a
Product
System Boundary for Waste Management
WRATE
 Wrate does not
include the life
cycle of the
products that are
now being
treated as waste,
they are only
included in the
system once they
become waste
WRATE
 Designed to model household waste but can
be adapted for single waste streams.
WRATE
 WRATE models:
 Non renewable resource Depletion
 Freshwater Ecotoxicity
 Acidification
 Eutrophication
 Global warming
 Human toxicity
 Land use
WRATE
 When a waste management process
generates a useable output, such as recycling
or energy from waste, there are
environmental impacts from the treatment of
those materials, emissions etc.
 There is also avoided impacts, i.e. where the
requirement for the production of energy from
more conventional sources is avoided.
 This is accounted for by subtracting impacts
of e.g. generating energy from waste from the
impact of generating energy from coal or gas
WRATE
 A key aspect of interpreting the results
from WRATE is to understand the
concept of avoided impacts
 negative numbers mean that the
burden of waste management system
is effectively avoided
Typical WRATE analysis of different
waste management options
Scenario comparisons
 A College collects the following:
 100 tonnes of paper
 1000 tonnes of food waste
 100 tonnes of drink cans
 500 tonnes of glass
 100 tonnes of plastic
Which treatment will have the biggest
impact in terms of global warming
 Landfill it all ?
 Burn it all in an energy from waste plant?
 Recycle it all?
All to landfill
All to Energy from Waste
Full recycling
Equivalencies
 WRAT can report impacts in two ways
 CO2 equivalents
 This takes into account the Global
Warming impact of different elements and
display them as kgs of Carbon Dioxide
 EUr person equivalents
 converts the impact to the amount of CO2
an average European person would emit
Global Warming Potential
Where are the burdens?
Where are the burdens?
 Landfill, collection, treatment and
transportation have direct impacts whereas
recycling see’s the biggest avoided impact
Where are the burdens in the
landfill?
Landfill burdens
 around 250 tonnes CO2 eq, is associated with
construction and operation of the landfill
Where are the burdens in the
landfill collection?
 202 tonnes from the production of large skips
Where are the avoided burdens in
Recycling?
Aluminium
Aluminium
 Almost 800 tonnes of fossil CO2 (or 62 Eur.
Persons) is avoided by recycling 75 tonnes of
aluminium
Waste Reduction, Recycling
and Climate Change
The use of the Life Cycle Analysis tool WRATE
Dr Peter Olsen
Scottish Environment Protection Agency
UCCCfS: Climate Change Action Plans – Planning & Implementation
Dundee College
Dundee 11th May 2009