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Zero waste promotes not only reuse and recycling but, more importantly, it promotes prevention and product designs that consider the entire product life cycle. [8] Zero-waste designs strive for reduced material use, use of recycled materials, use of more benign materials, longer product lives, repair ability, and ease of disassembly at end of ...
Resource recovery is part of a circular economy, in which the extraction of natural resources and generation of wastes are minimised, and in which materials and products are designed more sustainably for durability, reuse, repairability, remanufacturing and recycling. [3] Life-cycle analysis (LCA) can be used to compare the resource recovery ...
An illustration of the allocation of avoided burden and recycling benefits across life cycles. Avoided burden (also known as the 0:100 method or end-of-life method) is an allocation approach used in life-cycle assessment (LCA) to assess the environmental impacts of recycled and reused materials, components, products, or buildings.
Recovery and recycling of materials that have been dispersed through pollution, waste and end-of-life product disposal require energy and resources, which increase in a nonlinear manner as the percentage of recycled material rises (owing to the second law of thermodynamics: entropy causing dispersion).
The amount of energy saved through recycling depends upon the material being recycled and the type of energy accounting that is used. Correct accounting for this saved energy can be accomplished with life-cycle analysis using real energy values, and in addition, exergy, which is a measure of how much useful energy can be used. In general, it ...
By reducing the production and use of raw materials, closed-loop recycling minimizes harm to the environment and discourages resource depletion. [5] In contrast, open-loop recycling is the process by which a product is recycled but has to be mixed with raw materials to become a new product, typically leading to downcycling .
[3] U.S. EPA's SMM lifecycle of materials and products from material extraction, manufacturing, distribution, use and end-of-life.. Sustainable Materials Management (SMM) represents a framework to sustainably manage materials and products throughout the entire lifecycle, from resource extraction, design and manufacturing, resource productivity, consumption and end-of-life management.
The hierarchy captures the progression of a material or product through successive stages of waste management, and represents the latter part of the life-cycle for each product. [ 3 ] The aim of the waste hierarchy is to extract the maximum practical benefits from products and to generate the minimum amount of waste.