Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) is about going beyond the traditional focus on production site and manufacturing processes to include environmental, social and economic impacts of a product over its entire life cycle.
Looking at the industrial sector, taking LCT as an approach means going beyond the more narrow traditional focus on an enterprise’s production facility. A product life cycle can begin with the extraction of raw materials from natural resources in the ground and the energy generation. Materials and energy are then part of production, packaging, distribution, use, maintenance, and eventually recycling, reuse, recovery or final disposal (1).
LCT encompasses all three pillars of sustainability: (i) environmental, (ii) economic and (iii) social. In order to evaluate these impacts are available three tools Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and Social Life Cycle Assessment (S-LCA) for environmental, economic and social, respectively (1).
“Circular Economy” is often used synonymously with “closing loops”; to make possible the Circular Economy is necessary to step from a liner business model to a circular business model.
Through the approach LCT, is possible to test impacts of the circular business models, validate their assumptions and get feedback for improvement. In addition, it can help define targets and indicators to measure and foster circularity over time. In order to evaluate the impacts of the circular economy, applying a life cycle approach is highly beneficial. LCT can strengthen the propositions of circular economy, and the other way around.
Within the framework of HISER project the LCA and LCC studies were applied to demonstrate the feasibility of the new business model for the treatment of wood fraction from Construction and Demolition Waste.
Within the project innovative solutions are under developed for the recovery of wood fiber from Construction and Demolition Waste (C&DW): these valuable resources in fact can be used as raw materials in innovative building products avoiding at the same time unwanted waste.
The C&D W wood necessary for the evaluation are collected from several sites to the wood handling terminal of KS LAATUENERGIA OY (LAAT) for sorting. Pure fractions then are pre- and fine crushed at industrial facilities to the optimal particle size determined by the requirements of sorting and cleaning processes. Metal particles are also industrially removed from wood flow at the crushing line. At the sorting phase homogeneous wood fractions with different particle sizes are formed and stone and plastic particles removed by TIIHONEN ISOMO OLAVI (TIIHO). Particle size of homogeneous wood fractions and mineral wool are still downsized in the refining phases to the level suitable for product manufacturing processes. The C&D W wood fraction are utilized to produce Wood Plastic Composite (WPC) panels and profiles, under pilot processing at CONENOR OY (CON) facilities. The WPC panels and profiles WPCs are 100% non-toxic and recyclable back into producing new WPCs. The WPCs panel and profiles will be used for the construction of "shed" for the Finnish Governmental Forestry Department "Metsähallitus”. In a second stage of the project this innovative building element will be used for the construction of a bigger structure: "animal shelter" for ponies.
This innovative application is compared to a BAU (business-as-usual) system, in which the C&DW are directed for energy recovery and not recycled, and the demo shed construction is performed with virgin wood.
In order to compare the two solutions (Hiser and BAU) within the Finnish context the C&DW wood management as well as the shed construction perspective were taken into account in the study.
The main goal of the study is to investigate the feasibility of technological solutions recovering wood fractions from C&D wood waste, taking into account the overall value chain. As functional unit for the study was the treatment of 960 kg of C&DW wood and the construction of 1 demo shed is the functional unit used to compare the two overall systems.
From the study it was possible to underline that from the environmental and economic point of views, the overall Hiser solution, fostering circular economy, presents generally a lower impact rather than the BAU one (in more than half indicators, 11 on 14 impact categories). This is due primarily to the avoidance of virgin wood utilization, since it is replaced with C&DW wood, with a benefit for the environment and saving in terms of costs.
From environmental point of view the benefit of recycling is opposed to the benefit related to energy recovery, which implies savings and avoided impacts; however, in the majority of impact categories, this is balanced by the benefits related to avoidance of virgin wood utilization in the shed.
Go to the presentation Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) presented at Circular Economy conference in Rome, 21 April 2017
(1) www.lifecycleinitiative.org