LT: Economic and Optimization Analyses of the Reuse of Traditional Waste Materials

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9814551 Swan The objective of this research is to evaluate factors that effect the reuse/recycling of traditional waste products. Industrial manufacturing can be simplified into a set of processes that utilize, directly or indirectly, material resources to create final products. Waste materials are inevitably produced and these wastes must be handled and properly disposed of. For many environmentally inert materials, this final material management strategy is highly inefficient and simply results in disposal in landfills. The most efficient ecosystem would be one which optimizes its various interacting components (such as material, manufacturing and waste management processes) so as to minimize raw material use and waste generation, in part by maximizing the reuse and recycling of spent materials. The research is divided into two complimentary components. The first will analyze, on a generic level, how making a "waste" from the production or use of a product into a "resource" in the production of a new product (1) affects the local and global optimization of the manufacturing processes associated with both the original and new products, and (2) creates new economic linkages associated with the production of the new product as well as modifies those linkages associated with the original product. The research will analyze both the direct and indirect economic impacts, and specifically investigate how the optimization of production activities changes when post-process wastes are re-categorized as raw materials for production of other products. The second component will apply these analyses to the case of recently-developed, synthetic construction aggregates developed from two, traditionally large-quantity, waste materials: coal-combustion fly-ash and recoverable waste plastics. The research will lead to the development of an engineering tool for economic evaluation of new and innovative construction materials, thus providing a stronger rationale for their use as alternative materials. This grant is made pursuant to the joint NSF/Lucent Technologies Industrial Ecology Research Fellowships Program 1998.