Date: 2020-12-07
Programme: Industrial Ecology
Author: Bichler, Tobias (TU Delft Technology, Policy and Management)
Contributor: Cucurachi, Stefano (mentor), Rutten, M.M. (mentor), van Emmerik, Tim (mentor)

Degree granting institution: Delft University of Technology, Leiden University

Table of Contents

https://repository.tudelft.nl/islandora/object/uuid%3Afc6454d3-d411-464b-b349-994fbb39ade9

Abstract

  • How can the plastic mass balance of an urban area be modelled using Material Flow Analysis?
  • Developing a generic framework, which includes eight consumption sectors, three distinguishable littering processes and two subsystems (surface water system and soil)
  • A bottom-up approach is applied and the municipality of Leiden in the Netherlands is used as a case study.
  • The biggest plastic flows are packaging flows (4146 t), plastics in building waste (1342 t) and plastics in End-of-life transportation systems (570 t). The highest plastic stocks are in buildings (86080 t), transportation (14020 t) and electronics devices (10326 t).

2 Theory

2.1 Material Flow Analysis

2.1.1 Material Flow Analysis Studies on Plastic Flows

  • Only little research tried to assess plastic flows on the regional level.
  • Many analysis lacks stock assessment.
  • Joosten et al. (2000) assessed the plastic flows in the Netherlands using a so called STREAM method: the supply and the use analysis & the final consumption analysis. The method translates national “supply and use tables” from monetary units into physical units in order to account for the plastic flows on a national level.

    Try whether we can find the plastics data in IO tables

2.2 Citizen Science

  • Mobile application Litterati: focusing on land-based litter in the natural and urban environment with geo- and time- tagged plastic pieces (also tags for describing).
  • Currently there are around 3082 data entries for the year of 2019 (May 2020) on Litterati for the city of Leiden.
    image

3 Case Study Description

3.1 Municipality Leiden

3.1.1 Subsystem Surface Water

  • The municipal surface water system of Leiden is enclosed by three big water bodies, the Kagerplassen in the North, the Vlietland in the South and the Valkenburgse Meer in the West.
  • The Polder water system is lower than the Boezem water system, surrounding most of the BWS.

4 Method and Data

Figure 8: Generic MFA model for urban plastic flows and stocks, adapted from van Eygen et al. (2017)
image

Comprehensive analysis and quantification of national plastic flows: The case of Austria

Fig. 3. Results of the plastics budget for Austria in 2010 (exports of plastics include also their chemical or thermal utilization).Fig. 3. Results of the plastics budget for Austria in 2010 (exports of plastics include also their chemical or thermal utilization).

4.2 Investigated Materials

4.4 Packaging

  • Not considered as a stock because of a short lifetime.
  • Inflow data is from Afvalfonds Verpakkingen (2019) for the year 2018, which is allocated to Leiden according to citizen population ratio.
  • Assuming same compositions of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) in the research of Brouwer et al. (2018).
  • Assuming same plastic material types analysed as in Cornelissen and Otte (1995)’s research.

4.5 Buildings