Material Flow Analysis (MFA) of zinc: static and dynamic model

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Material Flow Analysis (MFA) of zinc: static and dynamic model

For the elective course on Material Flow Analysis (MFA) theory, we were asked to perform a study case that combined accounting with dynamic stock modelling. I chose to look at zinc because initially I wanted to do a study on global future availability of zinc for my thesis but in the meanwhile I changed my mind. In the end I will do something related to EIOA which I think it's more relevant for my future as an industrial ecologist.

For my study case I chose to do an accounting exercise for Europe in 2013 and a dynamic stock modelling until 2050. The chosen stocks were buildings and vehicles because they represent 84% of stock accumulation in society in Europe in 2013.

To do the accounting, a lot of data gathering is involved and it is a "pharaonic" amount of work. In the end it is rewarding since you can really see where the zinc is going. But it required weeks of going through databases and understanding what all those crazy codes and terminologies were. Why don't we just make a single type of code for everything? Would make the world a much simpler place.. Harmonization!! :D

In the dynamic stock modelling, I based myself on a video lecture done by Stefan Pauliuk for the IS4IE website. In that lecture he shows how you can model stocks in terms of year-by-year addition and subtraction of the stock. He uses Python and he has a lot of open source stuff in Github.

For more details you can read the report below and I hope it's not too boring :) The results that I show there are my own results, even if they are wrong I firmly believe in them!! (not)

The main fun conclusions were:

  1. There will be enough end-of-life zinc available from old buildings and vehicles from 2013 onward to fulfill the demand for stock maintenance if we could improve the end-of-life recycling rate and raise it above 70%. This is assuming that there is no population boom or a mega earthquake that destroys all the sudden all building stock :/
  2. Europe acts as a throughput in terms of zinc: it processes a lot of zinc but only 27% of it is used to build up stocks. The rest is basically exported. 
  3. Imports of raw material are 82%. Which means that we heavily rely on extra-EU imports to satisfy our industry. 
  4. We might globally run out of zinc by 2030 since there are 230 million tonnes reported reserves and we extract at a rate of 13.7 million tonnes per year
Enjoy!

 

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