Dear Colleagues,

Global warming and soaring waste generation are the foremost challenges faced by the modern world due to inefficient use of existing high-environmental-impact materials. To overcome these issues, recycling and reusing resources are increasingly being emphasized. Recycling could be a viable option, but not necessarily in all cases. Many technologies exist or are under development for recycling; however, the challenge of transitioning to resource-efficient systems is often not due to the unavailability of technology for resource recovery but due to poor planning and management and a lack of design methodology to highlight, recognize and utilize the solution with the lowest environmental impact for a particular scenario. Life-cycle assessment (LCA) is an ideal method to analyze the alternatives for resource recovery in a context of environmental sustainability. LCA is an interesting tool to compute environmental footprints of process and product streams during the course of their life cycle.

LCA can be more interesting and descriptive when combined with other assessment techniques such as risk assessment and technoeconomic analysis to examine different alternatives for a particular system and provide useful insights on the potential trade-offs among different impact categories. The use of recycling and LCA is an excellent combination, as LCA guides towards the goal of minimizing wastes.

This Special Issue will showcase studies on the impact of recycling on different high-environmental-impact materials (e.g, building materials, packaging and biobased materials). Studies in sustainable production, technoeconomic assessment, energy savings and scalability in the context of recycling and LCA of high-environment-impact materials are encouraged.

Dr. Humayun Nadeem
Dr. Warren Batchelor
Guest Editors

Manuscript Submission Information

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• global warming
• LCA
• recycling
• technoeconomic analysis
• sustainable process design
• environmental risk assessment
• scalability
• energy savings
• waste management