Regional distribution and losses of end-of-life steel throughout multiple product life cycles-Insights from the global multiregional MaTrace model.

ABSTRACT: Substantial amounts of post-consumer scrap are exported to other regions or lost during recovery and remelting, and both export and losses pose a constraint to desires for having regionally closed material cycles. To quantify the challenges and trade-offs associated with closed-loop metal recycling, we looked at the material cycles from the perspective of a single material unit and trace a unit of material through several product life cycles. Focusing on steel, we used current process parameters, loss rates, and trade patterns of the steel cycle to study how steel that was originally contained in high quality applications such as machinery or vehicles with stringent purity requirements gets subsequently distributed across different regions and product groups such as building and constructi

SUBMITTER: Pauliuk S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5302007 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature