Hello everybody,I am still quite new to LCA modelling and I have a question or several questions about paper recycling. In my particular case, I am investigating the printing process of newspapers. Now I am stuck with the aspect that paper waste, which is produced during printing, is fed into a process, e.g. it is used energetically (burned) or sorted and then fed back into paper production (recycling). I have tried out various things but felt that I was getting nowhere. On the one hand I am not sure whether I have to record the paper waste in the output or in the input with a negative value. I have used the following process "waste newspaper, Recycled Content cut-off". For your information: I work with openLCA and Ecoinvent 3.6. I use the cut-off approach. I would be very grateful for hints and help!Many greetings
Hi,
I would recommend having a look at the activity overview for ecoinvent 3.6, cut off. In this file you can filter for product name or activity name. In column O (“cut-off classification”) you can see if the respective product is classified as a waste or recyclable. “waste newspaper” is a bit of a special case. It is classified as a recyclable and is used as a direct input for “paper production, newsprint, recycled”. At the same time, there are also treatment activities for” waste newsprint” which represent a waste disposal (for example “treatment of waste newspaper, municipal incineration"). We do not have a recycling activity for waste newspaper in the database. Thus, waste newspaper itself is classified as a recyclable material which can be either used to produce recycled newspaper or be disposed.
I hope this answers your question.
Nora Minas, Junior Data Analyst, ecoinvent Association