Through the Circular Economy Package, the European Union aims to reduce raw material imports and the environmental impacts of waste management. This should be achieved by different means, including higher recycling targets. Recyclable wastes should be efficiently diverted and concentrated into separate waste streams in order to achieve a purity that allows high quality recycling. The targets, however, are so ambitious that even countries with highly developed waste management systems like Austria face great challenges in fulfilling them in an efficient way at a reasonable cost and with a minimum of environmental impacts.
The proposed CD-Laboratory for Design and assessment of an efficient, recycling-based Circular Economy aims to contribute to the EU’s Circular Economy targets by providing the scientific knowledge base for an efficient recovery of secondary raw materials from different municipal solid waste streams. This will be achieved by both the development of new and the improvement of existing methods of mechanical sorting, recycling, and efficiency assessment of waste management processes and systems, embedded in two CD-Laboratory modules.
In Module 1, a new method for assessing the efficiency of recycling in waste management systems is developed. The method relates economic and environmental impacts to different material-based recycling indicators and approaches, i.e. the recycling rate, the material concentration efficiency from statistical entropy analysis, and the heterogeneity invariant from the theory of sampling. All indicators are tested at present waste management systems. Case studies for organizational and technical measures to improve waste management systems towards recycling are then designed and analyzed. These case studies consider: 1) the potential increase in the separate collection of recycling materials from households considering future waste compositions and the increasing heterogeneity of recycling materials and waste; 2) the analysis and improvement of automatic sorting facilities for waste glass, metals, paper and cardboard, plastics, and textiles; and 3) the recycling of glass, metals, and minerals (the latter to produce concrete and cement) from waste incineration ashes.
In Module 2, options for innovations in automatic waste sorting technologies beyond the current state of the art are investigated. The results of the case studies and the advancements in automatic sorting are subsequently used to design scenarios for improved waste management with respect to recycling, which are evaluated by means of the efficiency assessment method developed.
The scientific results of the project will enable public and private stakeholders to decide on how to achieve the targets of the Circular Economy Package in an economical and environmentally efficient way and thus contribute to sustainable future raw materials management in Europe.
