The Industrial Ecologist

A plan for a circular campus (TU Delft) in 2030 In our master program, we have a course called Interdisciplinary Project Group ( IPG ) where the aim is to prepare us as industrial ecologists to the "real world". It is a common feeling in our master and in the student population of IE that we live in a bubble. We take for granted that every other human being in our society thinks like us and we are always surprised at how can we not for once just solve climate change and etc! I was listening to a podcast this morning called the Hidden Brain in NPR and for the 100th episode they invited the Nobel laureate and author of "Thinking, fast and slow" Daniel Kahneman. He said that our minds are not ready for tackling climate change and that the only to solve would be to send preachers everywhere that people would listen to. A bit like religion. Maybe that's the only way to solve the problem! Coming back to the aim of this post, we were asked to provide a plan on h...

Recycling of thin-film PV modules (Case of FirstSolar Inc.) The first entry to the blog is about a report I wrote with a classmate of mine Carina back in January 2018. It was in scope of the MS43315 Recycling Engineering Materials which dealt with the technicalities of the end-of-life (EoL) phase of metals, the challenges in product complexity, implementing a product-centric approach, etc. As part of the evaluation a study case had to be done concerning the study of the recycling potential and barriers of a complex industrial product. We chose thin-film CdTe modules due to their promising expansion in the solar market. Our conclusion were: Dedicated recycling facilities with a product-centric approach lead to higher end-of-life recycling rates (EoL RR) for complex products. Extended Producer Responsibility (EPR) and all that such legislation entails (Design for Recycling, etc.) are good governance mechanisms to improve the RI of the products in our economy. When producer...