Research

Strategic Materials Decisions: Systems Insights to Improve Recyclabilty

The average per-capita consumption of materials in the United States exceeds a staggering 50 kg each day. While the average consumption of the rest of the world lags significantly behind that of the United States, it is growing at twice the rate. As in other areas, the challenge is to accommodate this growth while preserving resource sustainability.

Materials choices affect every aspect of the life cycle of every product, from materials production to manufacture to use, end-of-life, and materials recovery. The environmental effects of these choices are not only the energy consumption and emissions from product manufacture, but also the environmental consequences of the uses to which these products are put.

Product and materials recycling can limit the environmental impacts of manufacturing processes, but its implementation has been largely opportunistic, rather than grounded in an appreciation of the interactions among materials science, production technology, materials markets, and product life cycles. Using simulation and stochastic optimization methods, ESD researchers have developed recycling strategies that include redesign of materials, products, recycler processes, recovery infrastructure, and policy. This work has shown that reframing production analyses around these broader interactions yields tools that can identify undervalued raw materials, refine batch-mixing decisions, characterize recycling-friendly alloy design, and guide strategic alloy choices. Additionally, the team discovered that probability-based models can identify operational improvements across many forms of production.

The Materials Cycle

This work is currently extended to model how recycling system policy and architecture influence recovery economics and effectiveness; the potential for technological solutions to mitigate the deterioration of secondary resources; and the role of recycling to manage volatility and scarcity in the larger materials system.

Gaustad, G., P. Li, and R. K irchain, “Modeling Methods for Managing Raw Material Compositional Uncertainty in Alloy Production,” Resources, Conservation, and Recycling, 52(2), 180–207, 2007.