Zhao X., You F., 2021, Economic and Environmental Sustainability of Waste Plastics Chemical Recycling from the Consequential Perspective, Chemical Engineering Transactions, 88, 1201-1206.
Consequential life cycle assessment (CLCA) enables evaluating the environmental consequences of market dynamics overlooked by attributional life cycle assessment (ALCA). A consequential life cycle optimization (CLCO) framework is developed in this work to determine the economically optimal and most environmentally sustainable chemical recycling pathway for high-density polyethylene waste. The framework includes CLCA and techno-economic analysis (TEA), and the CLCO problem is formulated as a multi-objective mixed-integer nonlinear fractional programming problem (MINFP) that is effectively solved by an optimization algorithm. This multi-objective optimization problem aims to minimize the unit life cycle environmental impacts with maximum unit net present value (NPV). Environmental assessment results show that the total greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions evaluated by the CLCA approach are 14.22 % lower than those assessed by the ALCA approach. By evaluating the ReCiPe end-point score, CLCA further reduces the total environmental impacts corresponding to particulate matter formation by 17.37 %.
