Evaluation of Waste Recycling in Venous Industry Using Environmental Indicator

As an environmental indicator for showing the contribution of recycling wastes and by-products to environmental impact reduction, a waste indicator using recycling rate has been proposed and its validity was confirmed in cement industry. To show the applicability of the proposed waste indicator to other venous industries than cement industry, the waste indicator values for cement, steel and paper industries were calculated and compared with the values obtained from the life-cycle impact assessment method based on endpoint modeling (LIME2). In addition, the effects of the differences in the definitions of the recycling rate, which shows the difficulty of wastes recycling, on the waste indicator value were investigated. As a result, when the recycling rate was defined as a ratio of the recycling amount to the sum of the recycling amount and final disposal amount, the waste indicator value was consistent with the evaluation result by using LIME2. This definition of the recycling rate was suggested to most appropriately show the difficulty of wastes recycling. Besides, the evaluation results indicated that the cement industry contributes most to the wastes utilization.