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122 Substance flow analysis of the recycling of small WEEE operators of collection, reuse and treatment facilities, public authorities as well as private and public research institutions. 7.4. SFA as assessment tool for waste management In Paper 2, three goals of the application of SFA in waste management were identified: Provide data for the technical operation of waste management facilities to quantify and improve the material flows and, thus, to reduce the losses of resources during waste management, Improve the life-cycle of products and enable a better communication between the actors along the product life-cycle, Provide data for conducting further research, like for example regional, national or global analyses of material or substance flows. The quantification of the substance flows rests upon a large amount of very different data, so that the quantification of the uncertainties and the data reconciliation are crucial to provide information on the reliability of the results. Uncertainties should always be quantified and discussed, even though they are (very) high and even though the uncertainties of the uncertainties are (very) high. Synergies could be observed by conducting the SFA: if the subsystems comply with the law of conservation of mass and no material is stored, the sum of the inputs is equal to the sum of the outputs. Therefore, if information is available on all the flows except one, the data reconciliation delivers the missing information. The SFA has shown in this thesis its ability to highlight the strengths and the weaknesses of a waste management system regarding its ability to manage the substances considered. The SFA does not seek to be predictive, but presents a “snapshot” of the substance flows within a defined time and geographical frame. Based on the knowledge gathered on the material flows, recommendations to improve the system could be systematically formulated. Quantitative data on the material flows condition the development of improvement strategies, as expressed in a very general way by Sir William Thomson (Lord Kelvin): “If you can not measure it, you can not improve it." For Brunner & Ma (2009), goal-oriented, effective waste management is hardly feasible “if we do not know substance flows through waste management”. Kahhat et al. (2008) also stated that the development of a sustainable WEEE management system “begins with understanding the culture within which the material flows take place“.
7. Recommendations 123 Reuter et al. (2005) criticised some research methods of the field of industrial ecology, to which MFA and SFA belong, by saying that “industrial ecology so far has not or only partly bridged the gap between its holistic concepts and the different industrial practices”. Bridging this gap is a challenge and requires a close collaboration between the research and the industry. From the industry, data and information on the practices are required. The research community should communicate more on the importance of research on industrial ecology and on its ability to deliver very useful findings for policy-support. Discussing the reliability of the data and presenting the uncertainties are essential to increase the credibility of the studies. Unfortunately, many MFA are published without a discussion of the reliability of the data and the uncertainties of the results. Further investigations are needed to complete the results and to quantify the flows of other substances and in other geographical areas. The recovery and discarding rates for palladium presented in Table 34 are probably similar to the recovery and discarding rates for other trace metals like tin, antimony or nickel, because these metals are recovered in the same recovery facilities. The results presented in this thesis of the flows of palladium and gold can not be transferred to quantify the flows of other materials like basis metals and plastics. The applied method is not only useful for assessing the recovery of valuable substances, but also for quantifying the amount of hazardous substances (for example mercury or brominated flame retardants) that is disposed of in an environmentally-sound way versus direct releases to the environment. In addition to the quantification of the material flows, future research can be combined with other methods like life-cycle assessment (Tukker et al. 1997) or social sciences modelling (Binder 2007), to provide more profound information for policy-making.
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ITU-Schriftenreihe, 2010 Institut f
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Bibliografische Information Der Deu
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Acknowledgements Here I would like
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Kurzfassung Die Nachfrage nach Edel
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Composition of the doctoral thesis
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4.1.1. Generation .................
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Figure 25 Flows of gold and palladi
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Table 26 Quantity of sWEEE (includi
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List of abbreviations Ag Au BAT CE
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3. Method 51 Table 8 Groups of equi
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3. Method 55 Equipment group Equipm
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3. Method 57 3.3.2. Data on materia
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3. Method 59 1. The visible hazardo
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3. Method 61 uncertainties were ent
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4. Data inventory 63 4. Data invent
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4. Data inventory 65 Table 11 shows
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4. Data inventory 67 The following
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4. Data inventory 69 average weight
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Page 127 and 128: References 127 Binder 2007 BITKOM 2
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Page 135 and 136: References 135 Melissen 2006 Mesker
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Page 139 and 140: References 139 StEP 2009 Stevels 20
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Page 161 and 162: Appendices 161 Appendix 10 Flows of
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