A LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT OF A NEW PROCESS FOR THE RECYCLING OF LEAD BATTERIES AND A COMPARISON WITH A TRADITIONAL PROCESS OF RECYCLING

Abstract

The current processes for the lead recycling from low batteries have different critical environmental issues and more efforts have to be done for the optimisation of their impacts. This work is part of a wider project (PON01_01366) that is intended to develop a new process based on an innovative technology which works at lower temperatures, highly mechanised, and selects the materials and treats them separately for a direct recycle. At the same time as the environmental impacts assessment, the partners of the project, the Clinical Physiology Institute of CNR (National Research Council), performed the relevant analysis about the lead workers exposure. The impacts in terms of environmental and human health are assessed both on the new proposed process and on a traditional process in order to compare the two systems and verify the benefits concerning the application of the new technology. For the environmental performance assessment and the two systems comparison, LCA – Life Cycle Assessment – methodology was applied, considering a Functional Unit equal to 1 ton of processed batteries. The impacts analysis and characterisation phase (LCIA- Life Cycle Impact Assessment-) was carried out using CML 2 baseline 2000 v2.05 method and IMPACT 2002+ v2.10 method, focusing the attention on the “Human Health” damage category. Furthermore were calculated the energy resources depletion, with CED v1.0 – Cumulative Energy Demand – method, and the water consumption. The innovative system proves to have much lower impacts, for all the considered indicators, than the traditional one. For instance the global warming indicator values are lower of 93.3% with a total energy consumption savings of 15171 MJ (-93.4%). The difference is due mainly to a greater energy (electrical and thermal) expenditure by the traditional system, which also has the need to add various virgin raw material in order to make a purer lead as output. Thanks to the supplementary analysis, that compares the innovative
process with analogous processes available in the ecoinvent database v2.2, the new proposed process shows to be a great solution also in relation to European benchmarks.