Quantifying the quality loss and resource efficiency of recycling by means of exergy analysis

Abstract Contaminants cause a decrease in the quality of materials with each recycling step. These quality losses should be minimized to increase the sustainability of resources use. Quality losses cannot be measured using weight-based recovery definitions alone, as the quality degradation cannot be translated by mass measures. Therefore, a better measure of the efficiency of resource use is investigated in the present work. Exergy is a measure of the quality of the energy and of resources in systems. The exergy losses are a thermodynamic measure of exhaustion and thus, of the quality losses in the resource systems. We describe a method to calculate the exergy content and exergy losses of metals during recovery and recycling of a concept car. The exergy losses attributed to recycling (the pollution with other metals) and the consequent need for dilution can be used as indicators of the quality loss of materials and of the efficiency of resource use in product systems.