Effective transition pathways toward circular economy based on integrated process models, economic models, and material flow analysis

基于集成过程模型、经济模型和物质流分析的循环经济有效转型路径

• 批准号: RGPIN-2019-04729
• 负责人: MajeauBettez, Guillaume
• 金额: $ 2.62万
• 依托单位: École Polytechnique de Montréal
• 依托单位国家: 加拿大
• 项目类别: Discovery Grants Program - Individual
• 财政年份: 2021
• 资助国家: 加拿大
• 起止时间: 2021-01-01 至 2022-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/ase-oro/Details-Detailles_eng.asp?id=737819
• 关键词: Effective; transition; pathways; toward; circular

Circular economy initiatives promote advanced material recovery and recycling technologies, material efficiency strategies, and dematerialization solutions. These initiatives are central to policies aiming to mitigate climate change, ensure long-term access to critical materials, and reduce various environmental impacts linked to landfilling and resource extraction. Yet the potential benefits and shortcomings of a large-scale adoption of such circularity strategies remain mostly unexplored and unquantified. Even if the small-scale use of a given technology offers environmental benefits, it does not necessarily follow that these benefits are maintained for a massive adoption of this technology across the entire economy. In fact, the applicability of circular economy strategies depends on multiple factors: the level of contamination of recovered materials; the presence of a sufficient market demand for the recycled materials at different levels of purity; the energy, material, and financial requirements necessary to achieve these levels of purity in recycled materials; and the climate and environmental impacts associated with these requirements; among others. All these factors cannot be linearly extrapolated from the present situation, and extensive scenario development is required to effectively guide circular economy policy choices. Taken in isolation, modeling techniques from material flow analysis, life-cycle assessment, and environmentally-extended input-output analysis can each capture only a limited subset of these factors. The current research program is therefore based on the hypothesis that a coherent integration of these modeling methods is required to define credible transition pathways toward a more circular and sustainable economy. This research program therefore aims to contribute to such an integration through the development of a novel analysis framework. To build this framework, a first task will convert national monetary accounts into a representation of material and energy flows throughout the economy. A second task will develop parametrized prospective models of potential technologies for waste recovery, recycling, dematerialization, and lightweighting. This task will strive to account for the material quality requirements of these technologies, and conversely, their influence on the composition of material flows. A third task will develop an analytical algorithm to coherently integrate the detailed technology descriptions of task 2 in the broader representation of the economy from task 1. This framework will be used to define scenarios of large-scale adoption of recycling and dematerialization strategies, focusing on the circularity of flows of metals and plastics in Canada. These case studies will be evaluated in terms of their overall benefits for climate mitigation, resource conservation, and reduction of other environmental impacts, potentially identifying situations of trade-offs.

循环经济倡议促进了先进的物质恢复和回收技术，材料效率策略和非物质化解决方案。这些举措是旨在减轻气候变化，确保长期使用关键材料并减少与垃圾填埋和资源提取有关的各种环境影响的政策的核心。然而，大规模采用此类循环策略的潜在利益和缺点仍未得到探索和未经量化。即使对特定技术的小规模使用具有环境利益，也不一定要遵循这些收益，以在整个经济中大量采用这项技术。实际上，循环经济策略的适用性取决于多种因素：回收材料的污染水平；在不同水平的纯度上，有足够的市场需求对回收材料有足够的市场需求；在回收材料中达到这些纯度所必需的能量，材料和财务要求；以及与这些要求相关的气候和环境影响；等等。所有这些因素都不能从当前情况线性推断出来，并且需要广泛的方案开发以有效指导循环经济政策选择。隔离，从材料流量分析，生命周期评估和环境扩展的输入输出分析中进行的建模技术只能捕获这些因素的有限子集。因此，当前的研究计划是基于以下假设：这些建模方法的连贯整合是为了定义通往更循环和可持续经济的可靠过渡途径。因此，该研究计划旨在通过开发新的分析框架来为这种整合做出贡献。为了构建这一框架，第一个任务将把国家货币账户转换为整个经济中材料和能源流的代表。第二任任务将开发潜在技术的参数性前瞻性模型，以恢复废物，回收，脱位和轻量化。这项任务将努力解决这些技术的材料质量要求，相反，它们对材料流组成的影响。第三个任务将开发出一种分析算法，以将任务2的详细技术描述一致地整合到任务1的更广泛代表中。该框架将用于定义大规模采用回收和脱非物质化策略的场景，重点是加拿大金属和塑料流的循环循环。这些案例研究将根据其在气候缓解，资源保护和减少其他环境影响的总体利益方面进行评估，并有可能确定权衡的情况。