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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 11 th May 2009. Life Cycle Assessment.

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Waste Reduction, Recycling and Climate Change

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  1. 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

  2. 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

  3. Life Cycle Assessment

  4. 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

  5. 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.

  6. LCA • It is also necessary to consider economic and social factors, as well as those environmental factors that cannot be quantified using LCA

  7. 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

  8. WRATE • LCA of waste management systems is different from a product LCA, in that the cradle-to-grave approach is applied only to the waste management infrastructure.

  9. WRATE

  10. 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

  11. WRATE • Designed to model household waste but can be adapted for single waste streams.

  12. WRATE • WRATE models: • Non renewable resource Depletion • Freshwater Ecotoxicity • Acidification • Eutrophication • Global warming • Human toxicity • Land use

  13. 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

  14. 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

  15. Typical WRATE analysis of different waste management options

  16. 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

  17. 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?

  18. All to landfill

  19. All to Energy from Waste

  20. Full recycling

  21. 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

  22. Global Warming Potential

  23. Where are the burdens?

  24. Where are the burdens? • Landfill, collection, treatment and transportation have direct impacts whereas recycling see’s the biggest avoided impact

  25. Where are the burdens in the landfill?

  26. Landfill burdens • around 250 tonnes CO2 eq, is associated with construction and operation of the landfill

  27. Where are the burdens in the landfill collection? • 202 tonnes from the production of large skips

  28. Where are the avoided burdens in Recycling?

  29. Aluminium

  30. Aluminium • Almost 800 tonnes of fossil CO2 (or 62 Eur. Persons)is avoidedby recycling 75 tonnes of aluminium

  31. 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

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