Tracking environmental consequences over space and time - Jean-Martin Lessard - ACLCA 2022 скачать в хорошем качестве

Tracking environmental consequences over space and time - Jean-Martin Lessard - ACLCA 2022

Assessing the life cycle environmental implications of new material circularity strategies requires simulating direct and indirect market responses across far-reaching and competitive industrial symbiosis. Yet, existing modeling capabilities oversimplify such large-scale adjustments using linear assumptions that one unit of recycled material replaces one unit of virgin material without ripple effects. This study aims to build such capacity through enhancing consequential life cycle assessment with a least-cost circular economic optimization material-product-waste chains model that is multi-regional and multi-industry. The latter simulates the market competition in supply-demand streams of virgin, recovered and waste materials across six regions and seven industries, while considering their costs (processing, transportation), market saturation, and availability. The model is used to assess the environmental consequences of two material circularity strategies for recovering post-consumer glass in the province of Quebec (Canada): the improvement of closed-loop bottle-to-bottle systems and the deployment of open-loop systems for producing glass powder as cementitious material. For both strategies, results highlight that between 55% and 94% of the environmental benefits falls beyond Quebec's jurisdictional boundaries due to direct and indirect material displacements. New secondary material supplies in Quebec displaced not only local virgin materials but also other competing secondary materials (e.g., cullet or coal fly ash) from the Midwest and Northeast United States. Indirectly, the surpluses induced in these markets are redirected to farther undersupplied markets, reducing their need for virgin materials. This suggests that conventional linear assumptions may result in misleading environmental consequences associated to new material circularity strategy. #LCA #impact #circulareconomy