Prof. Dr. Grit Walther
Prof. Dr. Grit Walther
Session: Supply Chain & Sustainability Management
Title: Recycling and Recovery
Infrastructure for Composite Materials
– Techno-economic, logistic and
environmental perspectives
Grit Walther has been Professor of Operations Management at RWTH Aachen University, Faculty of Economics, since September 2012. After studying geoecology in the natural sciences, she earned her doctorate in 2004 at the Chair of Production and Logistics at TU Braunschweig. From 2004 to 2010, she headed the working group "Sustainable Value Networks" at the Institute of Automotive Economics and Industrial Production at the TU Braunschweig and habilitated in 2009 with a thesis on this topic. Before her appointment to Aachen, she held the Chair of Production and Logistics at the University of Wuppertal from 2010 to 2012. The research focus of the university chair of Operations Management is on application-oriented, techno-economic modeling and evaluation of logistics and production systems as well as value chains. Research areas include market diffusion of new propulsion technologies in the automotive industry, network and infrastructure planning for alternative fuels, network planning for recycling and return logistics, robust and multi-criteria optimization of value networks, sustainable supply chain management, and planning and control of sustainable mobility systems. The research projects of the chair are implemented in interdisciplinary cooperation with engineering and natural science research institutes, industrial companies as well as political decision makers.
Recycling and Recovery Infrastructure for Composite Materials – Techno-economic, logistic and environmental perspectives
Waste masses of composite materials like Carbon and Glass Fiber Reinforced Plastics (CFRP/GFRP) used in rotor blades of wind plants or Expanded Polystyrene (EP) used as external thermal insulation in buildings, will be strongly increasing in the future. This demands for the implementation of appropriate recycling and recovery structures for such materials. Against this background, we present a methodology to design future recycling and recovery infrastructures for composite materials regarding technical, economic but also environmental aspects. Herein, we first analyze the future waste masses at a high spatial resolution, which allows us to regard for logistics aspects in collection and transportation of these often low-value but high-volume materials. Afterwards, we explore and evaluate the potential recycling and recovery paths from a techno-economic perspective. We also conduct a Lifecycle Impact Assessment to quantify the environmental impact of the different end-of-life treatment paths. Integrating these different perspectives, we then determine optimal future recycling and recovery structures using a mathematical optimization model. With this model, we can analyze the trade-off between economic and environmental objectives. Also, the model allows us to systematically analyze scenarios and sensitivities, e.g. regarding the impact of political regulations on the design of the required treatment infrastructures or the impact of changing market prices for secondary materials.
