Tom Devoldere

The eco-efficiency of reuse centres critically explored - The washing machine case

By repairing and reselling used products, reuse centres aim at creating low-skill jobs while offering low-cost and environmentally beneficial products. However, due to a combination of decreased efficiency of worn-out products and technological progress embodied in new products, lifetime extension of old products is not always the most beneficial scenario from an environmental nor an economic point of view. This paper investigates this trade-off for the case of washing machines in a Belgian context. For selected types of washing machines, critical reuse ages are determined above which reuse is environmentally or economically undesirable. A sensitivity analysis shows that these critical reuse ages are often sensitive to small changes of the input parameters.

Energy related environmental impact reduction opportunities in machine design: case study of a laser cutting machine

Energy consumption is responsible for a substantial part of the environmental impact generated by industrial production (Gutowski et al., 2006). Currently, minimising the energy consumption is hardly a priority for many machine designers, since they concentrate primarily on improving functionality, accuracy and safety. Nevertheless, alternative machine designs with improved energy consumption are emerging. This paper investigates the case of a laser cutting machine as common sheet metal processing machine tool. This paper verifies the potential for energy improvement by means of a case study. The analysis covers both the energy consumption during productive and non-productive time. Energy consumption improvement opportunities are identified. For this purpose a conventional CO2 laser-cutting machine was investigated and compared with a possible fibre laser based machine configuration. The analysis shows that the CO2 laser source and the chiller unit are the largest energy consumers during productive time. During non-productive time, 12% of the yearly energy consumption is required to keep the chiller and other components active. For the alternative machine configuration it is assumed that no energy is needed during off-mode. The same scenario saves 16.6 MWh during productive time because of the improved efficiency of a fibre laser source.

Product Clustering for Closed Loop Recycling of Flame Retardant Plastics: A Case Study for Flat Screen TVs

Closing material loops for the housing of electronic equipment remains a particular technical challenge because of the common use of Flame Retardant (FR) plastics. Within an industrial collaboration, series of experiments were setup to demonstrate the technical and economic feasibility of closed loop recycling of back covers of End-of-Life Flat screen TVs (FTVs). The results of these experiments show that the used type of plastic and FR is strongly producer dependent. Therefore, this paper proposes to cluster FTVs based on product brand to facilitate closed loop recycling of PC-ABS and HIPS-PPO with phosphorous FRs.