The carbon footprint of e-waste recycling - Indian scenarios

The carbon footprint of any product or process has become a reference value which is of increasing importance. As part of the WEEE Recycle project (www.weeerecyle.in) the authors have assessed the carbon footprint of metals produced from PC scrap in India under different recycling scenarios. To calculate emission figures, data from the ecoinvent database (Classen et al., 2009) (Hischier, 2007) were used. The results show that the use of secondary raw materials can lower the carbon footprint of new products. They also demonstrate that it may be valuable in economic as well as environmental terms to dismantle the scrap manually in India before then further processing it elsewhere. Manual dismantling results in a higher dismantling depth which leads to a higher metal content in the scrap entering the smelter. Therefore manual dismantling has a lower carbon account than mechanical dismantling. Regarding the extraction of metals through a pyro-metallurgical process it has been found that the high carbon footprint of the Indian electricity mix renders the option of shipping the waste to Europe more attractive in terms of lower carbon emissions.