[MUSIC] Hello everybody. My name is Thomas Astrup. Today I would like to talk to you about waste management and the role of waste, in relation to resource efficiency and circular economy. First of all, let's consider one of the greatest challenges that we face today. And within a few decades, we are likely to be many more people than we are today. Maybe up to 9-10 billion people within the coming decades. What is more of a challenge is that the average income of people is likely to increase as well. The so called global middle class is expected to significantly increase. What this will do is to put even more pressure on the consumption of food, resources, raw materials, energy, in our society. The great problem with that, is that most of the environmental impacts that we see today, is one way or the other related to the consumption of resources that we have in society. Most of you have probably seen figures like this here illustrating that in order to produce the goods and services that we want in society, we need raw materials. And in order to get those, we extract natural resources from the environment. After we are finished with using our goods and the services, we produce waste. Now in order to be a resource efficient society, we need to channel this waste, and the resources in waste back into the economy, back into industry, and utilize those as raw materials. But as you can probably imagine, the quality and the composition of these waste materials are not exactly the same as the raw materials that we normally use in industry. So making this a full circle is not so simple as it seems. The message is simple. However, we should not only use and lose our resources, we should somehow collect and select the right resources again for recycling. But the thing is how do we do that. How do we identify and develop the right technologies that provides a sustainable circle here? Well, we need to think about the whole circle. We need to consider the ways the resources are collected. We need tot think about what kind of secondary resources we can get from this. Whether this is energy, whether this is nutrients, whether is raw materials. We need to consider what type of products can be made from these resources. And we need to consider how these new products are used in society again. We also need to think about what kind of emissions are associated with this upgrading and management of the waste resources. But, first and foremost, we need to think about what kind of and to which extent do we actually save natural resources, which is what we want if we want to be more resource efficient. In other words, we need to consider the whole circle here, the whole chain of processes, and all the emissions and impacts to society and environment. Now consider for a moment that we can actually extract and isolate these valuable raw materials. It could be aluminum, glass, paper, plastic, and other. Then we can recycle those, and when we do that, we save natural resources. We do save the environmental impacts. We avoid the environmental impacts associated with the production of these materials, and we can almost save 100% of these impacts. This is illustrated by the red bars here on this negative axis. We may save most of the impacts associated with production of these materials in the first place. However, the recycling here is not for free. We also need to handle, to manage, to upgrade, to clean the materials. And this causes monumental lows. This is illustrated by the blue bars up here. In some cases, well we have a lot savings compared to the lows, but in other cases, we have also a significant amount of lows compared with the savings. So the net benefit for society, environment may not be as large as we sometimes think. Now in order to find the right solutions for recycling, we need to consider the whole flow of materials and resources in society. We need to quantify the magnitude of these flows, and the impact of recycling certain flows for the rest of the system. In this case for phosphorus, for Denmark, you can imagine zooming in on the tiny flow here. It may not save the world. But we need to understand the whole picture, the whole system in order to make the right selections in it essentially. We also need to zoom in on the individual technologies, the individual recovery technologies to understand the internal flows, the quality of the individual materials, the residual streams that may be there, in order to understand the full impact and the full potentials for recovery of resources. Now waste is not just waste. Certain flows have different qualities. In this case, as an example, paper and plastic and certain paper and cardboard materials here. We see significantly higher concentrations of problematic substances than in other materials, in other paper flows. The same with plastic and [INAUDIBLE] in this case. Some waste and plastic flow, some paper flows have better quality for recycling than others. Now in order to provide a full understanding, a full evaluation of these solutions here, at Digital Environment, we use life cycle assessment to provide a consistent evaluation. For almost 15 years, we have developed this life cycle assessment model which is now one of the most advanced models that we have, dedicated to material flows and resource flows. Here we can model, we can set up the exact same processes that we see in real life. We can model the individual processes, we can enter information about the waste qualities, we can follow the substances throughout the system. As good engineers, we take care in making sure that the mass balance as the material flows, the energy balances, the substance balances match throughout the system. And on this basis, we can provide consistent and systematic evaluation of the recycling solutions that we want to develop and put out in society. On this basis, we can provide society and decision makers with a systematic decision support. Now, it's important to understand that waste cannot save the world. But somehow we need to make the best use of the resources in waste. We need to have a detailed knowledge, and a detailed understanding of the waste qualities, the technologies, the processes involved in order to make the right decisions. And we need to have a variation of the full circle, the full routine of processes in order to make the right decisions. This is what we do at DTU Environment. Thank you for watching. [SOUND]
