engleski

The Role of Energy from Waste in Closing the Loop Concept

The European Union is putting a lot of efforts in the development of a low carbon, sustainable competitive and resource efficient economy. To do that, the transformation of the economy is needed in the way that material and energy devaluation of available resources is avoided. On this premises, the Circular Economy concept is developed where the value of resources, materials and products circulates within the European Union's economy and thus maintained in the economy for as long as possible. Waste is one of the biggest resource drains in the business as usual scenarios and its generation must be minimised to avoid wasting of valuable resources which the European Union does not have in abundance. But, waste is the by-product of modern living and therefore will always be generated. Generated waste need to be utilised in the way that generates the greatest benefit to the society by alleviating resource scarcity and import dependency, decreasing the volatility of the prices, helping to create new and innovative business opportunities which lead to more efficient ways of consuming and meeting demands by efficient production. This “closing the loop” agenda is widely recognised in the area of material recovery of produced waste and waste materials through closed loop (and where it is not possible, open loop) recycling, but energy side of “closing the loop” concept has not been looked upon and analysed as a way to use unavoidable refuse, by-product and degraded waste materials for energy production and use of this energy for meeting the needs of material production and recycling industry. This way, sustainability impact of material production, recycling industry and derived products can be further decreased. In this paper, this kind of analysis is done through tracking of changes in Embodied Energy of virgin and recycled materials when partial switch to using energy derived from waste and waste materials is done. These calculations are based on a Cumulative Energy Demand life cycle impact factor which is a proxy to assess environmental impact and correlates with more complex single-score life cycle impact assessment methodologies.

Energy from Waste ; Circular Economy ; Closing the loop concept ; Sustainability improvement ; Embodied energy

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