LIFE CYCLE ANALYSIS OF THE VALORIZATION CHAIN PROPOSED BY THE PROJECT.
The valorization chain of the waste flow made up of microfibers recovered from the filtration systems will be subjected to a life cycle assessment (LCA, Life Cycle Assessment), to quantify the environmental benefits potentially obtainable compared to the current management situation. This essentially involves the release of microfibers into wastewater or co-management together with undifferentiated waste. The LCA evaluation will take into account the energy and material consumption linked to the implementation of the proposed processes, the impacts avoided with the elimination of the flows of synthetic microfibers (currently released into the environment) and with the replacement of the raw materials currently consumed for production of micro- and nano-metric artificial diamonds.
The analysis will be carried out in accordance with what is reported in the international standards on life cycle assessment (ISO 14040/2006 and ISO 14044/2018). The definition of LCA in the international standard ISO 14040 reports that: "Life cycle analysis is a process of evaluating the environmental aspects associated with a product or service and considers the environmental impacts along the entire duration of the life cycle of the product (from the cradle to the grave) from the acquisition of raw materials to production, to use, up to its disposal". To carry out this evaluation it is therefore necessary to carry out a quantitative balance, as complete as possible, of all the flows of raw materials and energy entering or exiting the system under analysis, as well as the emissions in environmental compartments such as water, soil and air‚ deriving from each phase or process of the system itself. Furthermore, to identify the advantages due to the potential environmental impact reduction deriving from the proposed valorization process, it is necessary to define the reference scenarios (release of microfibers without treatment into water bodies or disposal in treatment plants with undifferentiated waste (mechanical/biological treatment and/or incineration and/or landfill).
The LCA study makes use of special software that allows to identify, quantify and analyze the environmental performance of products and services, examining even complex life cycles, according to the recommendations of ISO standards. In particular, in this project the SimaPro 9.1.1 software will be used; this software, developed for specific geographical and temporal contexts but adapted to more general contexts, uses various databases containing datasets modeling different processes or products and assessing impacts. Furthermore, to define the various processes, together with the data on energy and raw material requirements obtained from the experimental activities, some of the 10,000 processes included in the Ecoinvent 3 database will be used.