Industrial hazardous waste treatment: life cycle assessment of an innovative process for material recovery

The knowledge of a product's life cycle is essential to study the environmental impacts and the possible solution to them, and so is its end-of-life. Nowadays many products can be recycled, and technologies keep moving forward to help the process. Waste is not just waste, scrap to landfill or incinerate, from it can be possible to recover some material that can be reused in our daily life or in the industry. The scope of this Thesis is to explore and investigate the possible environmental impacts of a different pathway, an innovative procedure that differs from the traditional one. One of the most frequently used methodologies to make the environmental assessment of a product, process or service is the so-called “life cycle assessment” (LCA). This methodology uses the environmental impacts that are associated with a product or a process considering the entire life cycle. The innovative scenario introduced is peculiar because it helps with material recovery too and not just with thermal energy recovery, like a business-as-usual scenario. Of course, for the material recovery, the hazardous waste introduced inside the process needs some modification, a leaching process is added to make copper and aluminium precipitate and then become the avoided product and significantly lower the total environmental impact. The study was made with the use of SimaPro software that helps to generate the models. At the end of the Thesis, some added analyses were explored: sensitivity and uncertainty. Those helped to investigate different scenarios and compare the traditional with the innovative.