Economic assessment and carbon footprint of recycling rare earths from magnets: Evaluation at lab scale paving the way toward industrialization

Beylot, Antoine; Ménad, Nour‐Eddine; Seron, Alain; Delain, Michel; Bizouard, Alice; Ménard, Yannick; Villeneuve, Jacques

doi:10.1111/jiec.12943

Cited by 6 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…The analysis highlights the challenges with implementing improvements as well as the tradeoffs associated with these technologies in that several environmental impacts are improved, however, for other metrics the impacts will be higher than the current technologies. Last, a paper titled “Economic assessment and carbon footprint of recycling rare‐earths from magnets: Evaluation at lab scale paving the way towards industrialization” presents a case study in moving a process from lab‐scale to commercialization with the purpose of informing research prioritization (Beylot et al., ). This study focuses on using information available at an early stage of development and the propagation of uncertainty of the available data, as well as the impact on the economic and environmental assessment results.…”

Section: Assessing Technologies For Novel Materialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bringing a life cycle perspective to emerging technology development

Bergerson

Cucurachi

Seager

2020

J of Industrial Ecology

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Bringing a life cycle perspective to emerging technology development"While the fundamental approach to conducting an LCA of emerging technologies is akin to that of LCA of existing technologies, emerging technologies pose additional challenges. Despite the growing interest in applying LCA at early stages of technology development, there is a lack of systematic guidance for LCA practitioners to evaluate emerging technologies." Current analysis of new technology typically applies economic, environmental, social, and technical performance assessments separately, conducted by individual specialists with little connection between the analyses. For example, engineers often fail to capture the full life cycle (LC) environmental impacts of a technology they are designing, both over its lifetime and with respect to upstream/downstream activities within the supply chain in which the technology will eventually be deployed. The vast majority of life cycle assessments (LCAs) are still conducted on technologies that are much closer to commercialization. This is despite wide recognition that the greatest potential to steer technology toward environmentally preferable outcomes exists at the earliest stages of technology development. The challenge is that this stage also coincides with the least available data, greatest uncertainty, and a paucity of analytic tools for addressing these challenges (Bergerson et al., 2019). While there has been some discussion of methods related to the assessment of emerging technologies, most studies to date are case studies related to specific technology applications, conditions, and regional settings. The spectrum of emerging technologies ranges from products or processes that are innovative and potentially disruptive, to the next generation of commercial products incorporating marginal changes to an incumbent technology (Bergerson et al., 2019). The challenges and opportunities across this spectrum require further discussion within the research community to address questions such as:• When is it useful to conduct an LCA and what questions can it reasonably answer at different stages of development and commercialization?• What aspects of the technology/adoption context need the most careful consideration?• With what other tools or techniques can/should the LCA be coupled?While the fundamental approach to conducting an LCA of emerging technologies is akin to that of LCA of existing technologies, emerging technologies pose additional challenges. Despite the growing interest in applying LCA at early stages of technology development, there is a lack of systematic guidance for LCA practitioners to evaluate emerging technologies. There remains confusion about how LCA can (or should) be used at different stages of technology development and market adoption. The procedures and tools employed to assess emerging technologies still tend to be applied on an ad hoc basis, with no clear guidelines as to what methods are available, applicable, or appropriate. While some authors review and provide recommendation...

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Section: Assessing Technologies For Novel Materialsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bringing a life cycle perspective to emerging technology development

Bergerson

Cucurachi

Seager

2020

J of Industrial Ecology

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“…28−30 Early stage evaluation of a technology's economic and environmental impacts could avoid unnecessary investment and guide the technology development during scale-up and commercialization. 31 Therefore, techno-economic analysis (TEA) and life cycle assessment (LCA) are vital for the emerging waste plastic recycling and upcycling. 32 For instance, Singh et al illustrated that the enzymatic recycling process of PET waste could produce recycled TPA with 69%−83% less greenhouse gas emissions but at a higher cost.…”

Section: ■ Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Early stage evaluation of a technology’s economic and environmental impacts could avoid unnecessary investment and guide the technology development during scale-up and commercialization . Therefore, techno-economic analysis (TEA) and life cycle assessment (LCA) are vital for the emerging waste plastic recycling and upcycling .…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Economic and Environmental Benefits of Modular Microwave-Assisted Polyethylene Terephthalate Depolymerization

Luo

Selvam

Vlachos

et al. 2023

ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng.

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The growing amount of plastic waste endangers the environment. Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) is among the most widespread plastics due to its extensive use in fibers and packaging. Recently, chemical recycling and upcycling approaches have been proposed to produce valuable products from bale PET feedstocks. This work performs techno-economic analysis and life cycle assessment to evaluate the environmental and economic performances of various technologies, including electrification via microwaves over a heterogeneous catalyst. We demonstrate that using a microwave-assisted heterogeneous glycolysis process to produce bis(2-hydroxyethyl) terephthalate (BHET) could have lower production costs and emissions than the traditional dimethyl terephthalate (DMT) route due to the high reactivity and excellent reusability of the catalyst. The fast reaction rate and high selectivity render this process ideal for handling spatially distributed PET waste effectively.

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“… Material recovery and recycling – to achieve several effects, including reduction of materials passed to the next stages, as well as indirect saving of energy, water, other resources and footprints by virtue of substituting products and materials that usually take virgin resources. Such substitution has been preliminarily estimated to provide substantial benefits in terms of footprint reduction – see the example of rare-earth materials recycling ( Beylot et al., 2020 ). A search in Google Scholar on the keywords ≪ “waste recycling”, "product substitution", “footprint reduction” ≫, as of 30/08/2020 ( Google Scholar, 2020 ), produces many studies on product substitutions, but there is an apparent lack of quantitative studies that would relate the rate of recycling quantitatively to the reduction of footprints, energy expenditure and the economic performance.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Process assessment, integration and optimisation: The path towards cleaner production

Varbanov

Jia

Lim

2021

Journal of Cleaner Production

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This contribution starts from the broad perspective of the global material cycles, analysing the main resource and pollution issues world-wide from the viewpoint of the disturbances to these cycles caused by human activities. The issues are analysed in the light of the currently developing COVID-19 pandemic with the resulting behavioural and business pattern changes. It has been revealed in the analysis of previous reviews that there is a need for a more comprehensive analysis of the resource and environmental impact contributions by industrial and urban processes, as well as product supply chains. The review discusses the recent key developments in the areas of Process Integration and Optimisation, the assessment and reduction of process environmental impacts, waste management and integration, green technologies. That is accompanied by a review of the papers in the current Virtual Special Issue of the Journal of Cleaner Production which is dedicated to the extended articles developed on the basis of the papers presented at the 22nd Conference on Process Integration for Energy Saving and Pollution Reduction. The follow-up analysis reveals significant advances in the efficiency and emission cleaning effects of key processes, as well as water/wastewater management and energy storage. The further analysis of the developments identifies several key areas for further research and development – including increases of the safety and robustness of supply networks for products and services, increase of the resources use efficiency of core production and resource conversion processes, as well as the emphasis on improved product and process design for minimising product wastage.

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Economic assessment and carbon footprint of recycling rare earths from magnets: Evaluation at lab scale paving the way toward industrialization

Cited by 6 publications

References 17 publications

Bringing a life cycle perspective to emerging technology development

Bringing a life cycle perspective to emerging technology development

Economic and Environmental Benefits of Modular Microwave-Assisted Polyethylene Terephthalate Depolymerization

Process assessment, integration and optimisation: The path towards cleaner production

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