Keynote Talk: Circular Economy Waste to Resources Management Minimising Environmental Footprints

Sustainable management considers the efficient resources utilisation and environmental issues for long term gain, benefiting current and future generation. The management practices look beyond the short-term profit. This study aims to review the recent sustainable management strategies and methodologies given focus on environmental components involved in circular economy. The focus is given on the waste/nutrient, water and energy (including renewables) management. The strategies can be generally divided into three major groups: a) Maximise the utilisation of waste as secondary resources b) Minimise the resources used and improve the process efficiency c) GHG and Smog/Haze emission minimisation/mitigation/capture. Circular economy, industrial symbiosis, recycling and Process Integration concepts are the examples of maximising the utilisation of waste. It is mainly by reusing, recovering, sharing (mapping the supply and demand) or even better covering the 6R practice (reduce, reuse, recycle, recover, redesign and remanufacture). The improvement of the process efficiency focuses on upgrading and integrating the technical process by identifying the bottlenecks. GHG minimisation/mitigation/capture for reprocessing is a downstream solution for the released emissions. Several technologies for GHG reprocessing and biochar application are introduced to the circular management system. The GHG capture and storage are more linear and broken economy rather than reuse and circular economy. Environmental impact quantification methods being widely introduced have been environmental footprints. From more than a hundred of developed footprints several of them been analysed: Carbon/GHG Footprint, Nitrogen and Water Footprints, also Virtual Footprints related world-waste trade. The limitation and the need for an extended approach that complements environmental, financial and even societal considerations (e.g. sustainability index) has been also highlighted. This overview is pointing out two important issues in footprint quantification for future research: (i) Afterlife footprints demanding further attention and (ii) Lifespan issues need to be considered.