An official website of the European Union How do you know?      
European Commission logo
JRC Publications Repository Menu

Environmental and socio-economic sustainability of waste lubricant oil management in the EU

cover
A comparison of regeneration and energy recovery of waste oil
The first part of this study applies life cycle analysis and life cycle costing methods to assess the impacts of eight alternative scenarios (pathways) for the management of 1 tonne of waste oil with certain physico-chemical properties, including three regeneration pathways (hydro-treatment, solvent extraction and distillation) and five energy recovery pathways (two types of distillation into fuel oil, direct incineration in cement kilns, direct incineration in hazardous waste incinerators and direct incineration in industrial boilers). Whereas regeneration outperforms all energy recovery pathways from a climate change perspective, the results are more nuanced when considering the societal life cycle costs, i.e. the sum of internal and external costs (monetised environmental emissions). I In the second part of this study, we analyse different policies to achieve higher regeneration rates in terms of their environmental and socio-economic impacts. In particular, we quantify the impacts of a 70% and an 85% regeneration target at EU level. Both targets indicate rather minor benefits. The 70% target leads to 0.6 Mt total CO2-equivalent savings and 124 million € net savings in terms of societal costs over the period 2024-2045. For the 85% target, CO2-equivalent savings amount to 1.7 Mt, net savings in terms of societal costs to 330 million € (both over the period 2024-2045) and net employment creation to 329 jobs by 2045.
Garcia-Gutierrez, P., Klenert, D., Marschinski, R., Tonini, D. and Saveyn, H., Environmental and socio-economic sustainability of waste lubricant oil management in the EU, Publications Office of the European Union, Luxembourg, 2023, doi:10.2760/7597, JRC133752.
2023-10-26
Publications Office of the European Union
JRC133752
978-92-68-05061-3 (online),   
1831-9424 (online),   
EUR 31575 EN,    OP KJ-NA-31-575-EN-N (online),   
https://publications.jrc.ec.europa.eu/repository/handle/JRC133752,   
10.2760/7597 (online),   
Language Citation
NameCountryCityType
Datasets
IDTitlePublic URL
Dataset collections
IDAcronymTitlePublic URL
Scripts / source codes
DescriptionPublic URL
Additional supporting files
File nameDescriptionFile type 
Show metadata record  Copy citation url to clipboard  Download BibTeX
Items published in the JRC Publications Repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved, unless otherwise indicated. Additional information: https://ec.europa.eu/info/legal-notice_en#copyright-notice