To transport waste or transport recycling plant: Insights from life-cycle analysis

International audienceThe purpose of this study is to determine the environmental and economic balance between a collection of waste requiring the transport to a centralized recycling plant versus the displacement of a recycling plant near the waste production’s location. Two systems are compared in the study with economic and environmental Life cycle analysis (LCC and LCA) tools. The first one considers a centralized recycling plant that gathers batch of cables from different locations in Europe. The second scenario considers a transportable recycling plant, the Cablebox (designed by MTB Manufacturing), which is regularly carried to be close to the waste deposit to recycle waste cables. On the one hand, the study demonstrates huge environmental benefits for transportable recycling plants in comparison with the centralized system. The overall environmental impact is halved on the climate change indicator. On the other hand, the results show the economic advantages of such solution. The treatment cost per ton of recycling is reduced by 5 to 8%. Transportable recycling solutions seem to be a good answer to solve End-of-Life logistic issues, both from an economic and an environmental point of view