TY - JOUR
TI - Study of the environmental performance of end-of-life tyre recycling through a simplified mathematical approach
AU - Usón Alfonso Aranda
AU - Ferreira Germán
AU - Bribián Ignacio Zabalza
AU - Vásquez David Zambrana
JN - Thermal Science
PY - 2012
VL - 16
IS - 3
SP - 889
EP - 899
PT - Article
AB - The End of life tyres (ELTs) management generates CO2 eq emissions due to the  involved processes. Therefore, this research has been conducted with the aim  of quantifying the environmental performance of an ELTs management system,  in terms of CO2 eq emissions, which includes the recycling operation through  the ELTs treatment plant, the transport system and the secondary raw  material derived from ELTs processing; apart from other different ELTs  recovery methods. To this end, the environmental performance method based on  Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and complemented with the Clarke and Wright's  saving algorithm has been developed in order to evaluate and optimise the  location of the ELTs treatment plants. To validate the proposed method, the  Autonomous Community of Aragón in Spain is shown as a case study. Different  ELTs management scenarios have been analyzed for the Aragón’s ELTs treatment  plant and the optimisation of transportation of the baseline scenario is  carried out by means of the Clarke and Wright algorithm. By applying the  proposed methodology it has been identified that the current location of the  Aragonese treatment plant has benefits in net CO2 eq emissions for the  different radii studied with a maximum of 200 km. On the other hand, The  Clarke and Wright method has been applied in order to obtain the  transportation optimization of the total travelled distance from the 42  collection/sorting centres to the treatment plant. As a result, the  travelled distance can be reduced about 15%.