Study of the environmental performance of end-of-life tyre recycling through a simplified mathematical approach

Abstract

The End of life tyres (ELTs) management generates CO2 eq emissions due to the involved processes. Therefore, this research has been conducted with the aim of quantifying the environmental performance of an ELTs management system, in terms of CO2 eq emissions, which includes the recycling operation through the ELTs treatment plant, the transport system and the secondary raw material derived from ELTs processing; apart from other different ELTs recovery methods. To this end, the environmental performance method based on Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and complemented with the Clarke and Wright's saving algorithm has been developed in order to evaluate and optimise the location of the ELTs treatment plants. To validate the proposed method, the Autonomous Community of Arag?n in Spain is shown as a case study. Different ELTs management scenarios have been analyzed for the Arag?n?s ELTs treatment plant and the optimisation of transportation of the baseline scenario is carried out by means of the Clarke and Wright algorithm. By applying the proposed methodology it has been identified that the current location of the Aragonese treatment plant has benefits in net CO2 eq emissions for the different radii studied with a maximum of 200 km. On the other hand, The Clarke and Wright method has been applied in order to obtain the transportation optimization of the total travelled distance from the 42 collection/sorting centres to the treatment plant. As a result, the travelled distance can be reduced about 15%.