MM9831 - Circular Economy & Resource Recovery from Waste

Rationale

In this assignment, you are asked to demonstrate comprehensive understanding and tangible skills relevant to applying system assessment methodologies on a circular economy case study of the UK Plastics Pact. The UK Plastics Pact has ambitious targets aimed at transitioning the UK plastics production to a circular economy approach structured around increased recycling. However, the wider implications of meeting these targets is not clear, for instance, the cost of drastically increasing recycling or the impact on greenhouse gas emissions, jobs and plastic recyclability.

System assessment methodologies, such as the Complex Value Optimisation for Resource Recovery (CVORR) method used in this assignment, are an essential engineering technique for designing system-level interventions. CVORR allows the impact of interventions to be quantified across environmental, social, technical and economic domains. The CVORR approach is therefore ideally suited for assessing the impact of meeting the UK Plastics Pact, and enabling decision making. The transferable skill obtained and demonstrated here can be applies in any circular economy / resources recovery systems assessment.

Learning outcomes being assessed

This course work is directly assessing the module learning outcome 1: “Thorough understanding of science and engineering principles and practices in relation to current and emerging challenges that come under circular economy [,,,], including techniques at the forefront of systems analysis”. Additionally, the assignment is highly relevant to learning outcome 2: “Able to apply engineering techniques and design system-level interventions, taking into account the commercial, industrial and regulatory constraints and the social context of the challenge at hand, as applicable to circular economy of solid waste”. And part of the learning outcome 3: “Apply relevant problem solving and communication skills in specific cases […]”.

Assignment Guidance

This is a group project. There are 6 groups. The groups you are assigned to are listed in the VLE / opening presentation (L01) / MS TEAMS channels. Allocation into these groups was random.

Within each team: Apply the CVORR methodology to the case study of the UK Plastics Pact. This application involves three parts:

Part A: Modelling the system

Part B: The wider impacts

Part C: Future scenarios

Detailed guidance on the assessment is provided in Appendix 1 of this document.

Submission piece 1: A written report (Ms Word document) detailing and summarising your answers to the questions of PART A, B and C (see Appendix 1). The written report should be no longer than 12 pages, formatted in “Calibri 11”, excluding the list of references, cover pages and contents page. Longer reports will be penalised with minus 10% per additional page. The report should be separated into three PARTS (A, B, C), corresponding to the three parts of the assessment tasks. Results should be summarised with the use of tables, graphs or diagrams, with any further analysis in text.

The report must be produced as a group effort; formatted and written coherently with a single ‘voice’, as would be expected from any commercial consultancy report. Submissions that appear to have been written independently by different members of the team will not be marked favourably. Figures and graphs should be presented clearly and legibly.

Provide references when you refer to evidence obtained in the literature

Submission piece 2: MSExcel spreadsheet containing the calculations. Please take care to label all flows clearly and set it out in an easy to follow manner with annotations to describe your calculations. Please place any data you used in a sheet labelled “Data” and link the calculations to this sheet instead of inputting values directly into formulas. This will make it easier for us follow your working and assess if you have understood the tasks.  

Assessment Criteria and Process

All key background material needed is provided in the VLE and explained in class CW-01 Session.

You may also find useful the University guidance on skills and on academic writing / presentation: https://library.leeds.ac.uk/skills.

For delayed team submissions, there will be a penalty for the mark (10% per each delay day).

All assessment will be second marked.

There will be peer-assessment within each group, using the on-line toolkit Buddycheck available to the University. Details will be provided just after the submission of the coursework. Individual marks will be obtained based on the team mark and the peer assessment.

Assessment Rubric/Grid

The 70% marks are allocated as in Assessment Criteria table, in the section directly above.

Contact

For any enquiries please contact: Module convener: Dr Costas Velis: [email protected] and CC. Mr Ed Cook: [email protected] 

Academic misconduct and plagiarism

Leeds students are part of an academic community that shares ideas and develops new ones. You need to learn how to work with others, how to interpret and present other people's ideas, and how to produce your own independent academic work.

It is essential that you can distinguish between other people's work and your own, and correctly acknowledge other people's work.

All students new to the University are expected to complete an online Academic Integrity tutorial and test, and all Leeds students should ensure that they are aware of the principles of Academic integrity.

When you submit work for assessment it is expected that it will meet the University’s academic integrity standards.

Appendix 1

1. INTRODUCTION

1.1. Background

Plastic packaging waste has become an important topic over recent years, with its use attracting criticism for poor recycling performance and pollution of marine and terrestrial environments. There is increasing pressure across society for a response from both commerce and government to improve resource efficiency of plastics, reduce marine pollution, and other environmental impacts. The responses have been varied, with a range of initiatives such as plastic bag bans, ‘plastic free aisles’ in supermarkets and proposed deposit return schemes.

The UK Government’s 25-year Environment Plan (HM Government 2018) has a key focus on plastics, committing the UK to eliminating avoidable plastic waste by the end of 2042. This has also recently been strengthened in the Waste Strategy for England (Defra 2018b).

Industry has also responded to mounting public concern about the sustainability of plastic packaging. The UK Plastics Pact (WRAP 2018c) is a voluntary commitment by UK business initiated by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (2017) as part of its New Plastics Economy initiative. As a result, more than 40 UK businesses have committed to a deadline of 2025, by which plastic packaging must be:

· 100% reusable, recyclable or compostable

· 70% effectively recycled

· 30% average recycled content across all plastic packaging

Meeting these targets may result in considerable changes to the way that plastic packaging is produced and used, as well as how it is treated and disposed of when it becomes waste.

In this assignment you will be investigating the flow of plastic packaging waste from the point it is discarded, to its fate. You will examine the interlinkages between the different stages through the system in order to consider issues relating to climate change, resource recovery and waste management, as well as broader socioeconomic issues occurring within and outside of the UK.

1.2. Problem definition

Approximately 2.2 million tonnes of plastic packaging waste are generated in the UK each year, most of which becomes waste. Almost all of the waste is collected, and either recycled, incinerated or disposed of in landfill.

The term ‘plastics’ covers a broad range of material types which are formed into many shapes, sizes and which serve multiple purposes. When plastics are collected for recycling, they are almost always mixed which means that considerable effort is required to disaggregate the complex mixture. Plastics recyclers and sorters suffer from high loss rates, which can damage their business case, and ultimately, this has resulted in limited capacity for reprocessing of plastics in the UK and many other high-income countries.

Despite the UK’s limited reprocessing infrastructure capacity, collection rates have continued to increase, and therefore between 50% and 75% of collected plastics are exported to other countries each year. Exports of plastics waste have come under increasing scrutiny due to the theoretical link between environmental pollution in the recipient countries. In 2018, China banned the import of all types of post-consumer plastic waste which has led to significant shift in the secondary plastics markets to other countries.

1.3. Plastics systems

The illustration below depicts, in very simple terms, the flow of plastics through the various stages in the UK’s production, use and end-of-life phases; note that the true system is much more complex, and that only the main steps are shown here. One of your tasks will be to prepare a similar illustration to answer the research question posed below. You can see from the system representation that each process has various inputs and outputs.