Life Cycle Assessment for Particular Waste Categories Treatment

This paper is concerned with textile wastes, considering both used clothes and textile scraps from tailoring industry. The basic option of fabric production from new raw material and disposing the considered textile wastes, by means of Waste-to-Energy process, has been compared with the possibility of reusing the textile wastes within the textile production cycles. The aim of this study is the comparison of the environmental performance, by means of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of two different cycles for textile production: the “worsted fabric cycle”, that uses only new raw wool, and the “carded fabric cycle”, for which regenerated wool is used. Actually, the two technological cycles produce two kinds of fabrics with quite different aspects and qualitative characteristics. Further, there is a qualitative difference also between the carded fabric produced starting from used clothes and rags and the carded fabric from the scrap of new materials from the tailoring industry. In order to minimise the differences in the final fabric characteristics, a reference carded fabric with its composition - typical from the Prato (Italy) industrial district - has been considered while for the worsted fabric cycle, it has been assumed to substitute the recycled wool fraction with new wool. According to this assumption, the qualitative differences between the two products become slight and a consistent comparison is possible. Hence, the comparison has been carried out considering three possibilities: the worsted fabric cycle, the carded fabric cycle using new scraps from tailoring industry, the carded fabric cycle fed by used clothes and rags from their separated collection within the waste collection system. Particular attention has been devoted to the final treatment of the scraps form the processes in the three scenarios, considering that the input materials for the carded fabric scenarios (new scraps or rags) are waste materials in the worsted fabric scenario and the assumed fate for them was Waste-to-Energy process. The production phases of the two fabric cycles have been described, in the inventory analysis, by collecting data in the factories of the Prato industrial district, in terms of inputs (raw materials, energy, manufactured materials, water, etc.) and outputs (scrap, emissions to air, emissions to water, solid wastes, etc.), from each process, and data from LCA devoted database have been used, too. The results of the impact assessment phase have been expressed by using the Eco-indicator’99 method and show a better environmental performance for the cycles using recycled wool.