Life Cycle Inventories and ESCAPE Datasets for the Comparative Environmental Assessment of Noble Metals Recovery from E-Waste

The ESCAPE index (Evaluation of Sustainability of material substitution using CArbon footPrint by a simplifiEd approach) is a simplified sustainability assessment tool based on the Embodied Energy (EE) and Carbon Footprint (CF) metrics. It allows for a preliminary sustainability analysis of materials, processes and technologies, by comparing the sustainability of recovered or alternative materials to that of their original, primary equivalents (Bontempi, 2017).
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is a well-established and standardised methodology for quantifying potential environmental impacts by adopting a holistic view of the system under study.The here-reported life cycle inventory and ESCAPE datasets were used to carry out an ESCAPE- and LCA-based comparative assessment to investigate the same experimental system, focused on the recovery of Noble Metals (NMs) (i.e., Cu, Ag, Au) from waste Random Access Memories (RAMs) (Rigoldi et al., 2019).The spreadsheet file ‘ESCAPE_index_data_NMs_recovery.xlsx’ includes input data for each process phase, the Embodied Energy and Carbon Footprint values associated with the mechanical and thermal processes and the reagents used in the recovery process, as well as those related to the primary extraction of Au, Ag, and Cu, and the ESCAPE index calculations for each metal.The spreadsheet file ‘LCI_data_NMs_recovery.xlsx’ provides detailed life cycle inventory data used to perform the LCA. It includes detailed LCI tables for the pretreatment, leaching, and recovery steps, as well as for the equipment required to perform the NMs recovery treatment at the laboratory scale.

This work was carried out in the framework of the “SMART PCBs - Sustainable Materials Recycling Technology for Printed Circuit Boards” project co-funded by the Italian Ministry of Environment and Energy Security (MASE), Call RAEE 2020, CUP F57G20000050001.