(502c) Sustainability and Resiliency Assessment for Industrial Synergies between Renewable Energy and Chemical Production

Photovoltaic (PV) is the fastest growing energy technology and is expected to maintain this growth in the coming years. Due to the durability of PV modules, there is a lengthy time gap between installation and decommissioning of the modules, and it is expected to create large scale waste worldwide in the near future. On the other hand, chemical manufacturing systems are undergoing significant transition towards bio-based production to meet the goal of sustainable low carbon feedstock. This work presents a potential synergy between renewable energy wastes and bio-based polymer production through extending a previously proposed system to circularize the PV lifecycle by diverting organic byproducts from PV recycling to agricultural production. We identify and introduce additional synergies as links in the network to close the loop between PV module disposal and manufacturing. The chemical outputs from the PV recycling process are used as fertilizers for crops that are potential feedstock for biopolymer production. These biopolymers are used in the manufacturing of PV backsheets, replacing the current petroleum-based products. We quantify the total life cycle environmental and economic benefits at scale of implementing this synergy along with total reduction in GHG emissions. To evaluate the design, we also use a network-based approach to understand the structure and topology of the proposed system by exploring various network measures as well as information theory-based measures, to assess resilience and long-term sustainability. We show quantitatively that network measures like diameter and density are ineffective at scoring the network resilience due to the nature of these measures in original network science literature, while centrality measures are useful for finding the relative importance of certain nodes, which may highlight network vulnerabilities that factor into the overall resilience. Likewise, ascendency and reserve values for the network appear useful in determining the overall resilience and sustainability of the network, however, based on their application to comparing two alternative network scenarios, these metric interpretations should be more rigorously defined for industrial networks before being incorporated for industrial network design.