How can we predict the evolution of recycling chains

Sustaining the material needs of society is an increasingly complex task, as demand grows for sophisticated materials. Concerns regarding material availability are rising, thus many studies following material stocks and flows in the economy and defining material criticality are being conducted. These assessments provide information that can be decisive for the industrial implementation of sustainable and innovative technologies. Disruption risks to the supply chains must be predicted to prevent material shortages at the corporate, national and global scale. Designers can play a major role for the preservation of material resources by considering the evolution of availability at the material selection stage. With the product lifecycle in mind, material recyclability will progressively become a key factor for the design process, in order to foresee potential vulnerabilities and foster material recycling. This paper is part of an on-going research being conducted at the G-SCOP lab of the Grenoble Institute of Technology, whose aim is to provide dynamic resource scenarios and additional input to Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methods and Design for Recycling guidelines, so as to assist material selection in the design process. It presents a framework and the research methodology employed to identify the parameters that determine the evolution of recycling chains, based on material flow data and historical accounts of the shifts, ascent and decline of recycling activities. This should allow designers to incorporate material criticality and recyclability to their Life Cycle Assessments and fill an important gap since there are very few wide-ranging compilations of data describing the history of the recycling processes and industry in literature.