1.E Industrial Waste

This WP aims to develop an interactive tool to promote industrial symbiosis of key industries in the Czech Republic with the working name PruSym. This will serve both the industry for information on potential opportunities and the IMI as a way of monitoring the situation in the Czech Republic. The aim will be to create an information environment using GIS tools for monitoring the production of waste, secondary raw materials and by-products from key industries in the Czech Republic, which will enable the reduction of waste production by the efficient use of these material flows and reduce their environmental impacts with respect to their entire life cycle, while taking into account acceptable costs paired with product quality. The propsed system would in the future aim to streamline the management of waste, by-products, secondary raw materials and thereby support the development of a circular economy within individual industrial activities. Another goal of PruSym would be to develop the use of eco-labelling in B2B communication between businesses by implementing data from Environmental Product Declarations (CSN ISO 14025) or similar environmental types of reports.

In order to develop more economical technologies beyond the currently defined BATs, it is necessary to compare these techniques with each other. While improving a process or technology may lead to some improvements in one area (e.g. less toxic waste, lower energy intensity of production itself, increased production), it may generate other forms of burden (e.g. increased waste production, transfer of pollution to other environmental compartments, greater consumption of subcontracts produced by another higher energy intensive organisation, etc.). A uniform system for comparing the environmental benefits of techniques and technologies operating in accordance with BAT and their economic indicators does not yet exist. The second output of this WP will be an LCA-based database of technologies to effectively recycle, reuse and minimise the production of waste for which there are available European Commission Implementing Decisions (BAT Conclusions) to enable benchmarks to be developed for subsequent technology benchmarking and to determine whether a given improvement delivers a genuine environmental benefit. The database would be referred to by the acronym ParaBAT.

Parallel to the creation of a system that monitors the circular economy primarily from the point of view of the environmental assessment of LCAs, the WP will develop an economic evaluation process for LCCs, allowing for maximum use of the material flow data obtained to carry out analyses beyond the usual — partly already legislated — LCA framework. In particular, this will fulfil the programme’s vision of “efficient use of material flows” and “with regard to the acceptable cost of . . . products” as these can then be quantified and compared with other aspects of the use of specific technologies. But it will also allow for the opposite approach, based on modelling of the economic life cycle of the products, in which the environmental aspects pursued will be incorporated both as cost Type V (externalities), which has a number of uses to be tested here. On the one hand, it is possible to model the transfer of externalities between different actors in the supply chain and to identify their sensitivity to changes in valuation. This will help in estimating the impacts of different public policy options (which are often ineffective due to the so-called agency problem), but also in optimising the use and location of specific technologies. It is also possible to model the impacts of regulatory measures, taking into account externalities, on the competitive position of different technical or technological solutions in relation to an appropriately chosen functional unit.

The next item of this WP will be an analysis of selected real technologies in the Czech Republic, a comparison of their compliance with the current BAT requirements (unless previously carried out in the context of the IP review triggered by the BAT Conclusions) and a technological and economic foresight, including experimental verification, on selected technologies that are in line with the expertise of the WP members (energy, waste management, metal-processing, chemical industry). This analysis will help in the implementation of the principles of circular economy in the Czech Republic to use especially new/modern technologies with high efficiency in place of importing often obsolete and technologies in the process of abandonment. This analysis is also crucial because of the recent dynamic development of waste recovery technologies, with a review of BAT technologies being carried out over a longer period of time. Here, there is also the possibility of going beyond the assessment of new technologies to BAT. To this end, there is a process of assessment in the national BAT Technical Working Group on Waste Treatment, followed by their transfer to the international TPS and incorporation into the Best Available Techniques Reference Document (BREF). This know-how will be used for the above tools and the assessment of BAT technologies.