폐소형가전 선별·회수 공정의 전과정평가 연구

최우진¹, 박은규¹, 박기학¹

Study on Life-Cycle Assessment for Recycling Process of Used Small Household Appliances

Woo Zin Choi¹, Eun Kyu Park¹, Ki Hak Park¹

¹수원대학교 폐기물자원화기술연구소

¹Waste Recycling Institute, The University of Suwon

ⓒ Copyright 2016 The Korea Society for Life Cycle Assessment. This is an Open-Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Published Online: Aug 31, 2016

Abatract

This study aims at evaluating the environmental impacts on recycling process for used small household appliances. The recycling process mainly consists of 1st-stage crushing, manual dismantling, magnetic separation, 2nd-stage crushing, eddy-current separation and near-infrared ray(NIR) separation. The overall capacity of the process is about 15 ton per day to treat used small household appliances. In this study, life-cycle assessment(LCA) methodology is applied to analyze major environmental parameters such as GWP, ADP, POCP, EP, etc. One of the major impact categories on the weight basis in the recycling process is global warming(GWP) 57.1 %, next to ADP 35.4 % and POCP 4.8 %, respectively. As a result of environmental impact on recovery of valuable resources/ton, the GWP of plastics for ABS is highest(51.41 %) compared to ferrous(8.61 %). The effects of environmental and economical benefit are also analyzed to compare with the amount of virgin materials to be recycled by recycled materials. In addition, recycled materials are also more economical in comparison to virgin materials due to the environmental avoiding effect by recycling. In conclusion, the key environmental issues related to the recycling of e-wastes are analyzed and therefore, the effective recycling process will contribute to mitigate global warming potential in the near future.