Quantis’ work during the 1st year (M1-M12) of BlackCycle was focused on the preparation of the framework for the health & safety, sustainability and economic assessments and the data feeding into the Raw Materials Information System of the European Commission. Moreover, Quantis focused on the goal & scope of the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Circularity Assessment, which will follow in year 2 (preliminary studies) and year 3 (final studies) of the project.
In collaboration with the relevant project partners, Quantis worked towards setting a common basis for the evaluation of the investigated technology, including the goal and scope of the different assessments (functional unit(s), system(s) to be studied, system boundaries, time horizon for the assessment of the investigated technology per system, most relevant indicators for the life cycle impact assessment methods to be applied, specific application(s) of the system, reference technologies to which the novel technologies shall be compared) as well as the data collection management plan to ensure good quality input data for all the different assessments that will be performed within the sustainability assessment framework of the BlackCycle project.
The management of data collection and identification of common data needs is addressed as well. A preliminary identification of the foreseen connections and common data needs among the different tasks is performed, and will be enhanced further during the data collection phase.
In parallel, Quantis has worked on defining the goal & scope of the LCA and Circularity Assessment, as well as identifying the specific data needs from project partners. The LCA will provide for a global environmental assessment of the new value chain, with the system being studied from 3 aspects, namely 1) End-of-Life tyres (i.e. LCA of 1 ton of ELTs), 2) Tyre life cycle (i.e. LCA of 1 tyre driven 1’000 km) and 3) Carbon Black (i.e. LCA of 1 ton of carbon black, at gate). The circularity assessment is complementary to the LCA and will provide a single metric calculated to estimate how a system performs in the 3 principles of the circular economy. As a first step, Quantis has identified the available methods and will work into selecting the most appropriate for the scope of this project. The review will be conducted among the Material Circularity Indicator (MCI) by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, the Circular Transition Indicator (CTI) Tool by WBCSD and a set of qualitative indicators for product and/or company level assessment, such as the Circular Economy Toolkit (CET), the Circular Economy Indicator Prototype (CEIP), or the Circularity Potential Indicator (CPI).