Assessing the Life Cycle Environmental and Economic Performance of Copper Slag Recycling

Industrial solid waste refers to all solid waste derived from industrial processes. Industrial solid waste, on the one hand, may lead to environmental risk and safety issue; on the other hand, contains valuable recyclable resources. Taking copper slag as a case study, the life cycle environmental and economic performance of recycling process were analyzed by using life cycle assessment and life cycle costing approaches. The functional unit was defined as the recycling of 1 ton of copper slag. The results showed that the process of production of cement after floatation was the optimal scenario for copper slag recycling, and its life cycle impact and life cycle cost were-67.22 Pt and-479.28 yuan, respectively. Specifically, the dominant environmental impact category of copper recycling process was respiratory (inorganic). In addition, raw material, fuel and power, equipment depreciation and transportation contributed to the life cycle cost in descending order of their proportion.