Helmut Rechberger

TU Wien | TU Wien · Institute of Water Quality and Resource Management

Zusammenfassung In den letzten Jahren kam es zu einem Paradigmenwechsel bei Kläranlagen, der den alleinigen Zweck der Abwasserreinigung um eine zusätzliche Funktion der Ressourcenrückgewinnung erweiterte. Dieser Wandel geht mit der Entwicklung neuer Rechtsvorschriften einher, die eine bessere Ressourcenrückgewinnung aus dem Abwasser ermöglichen wol...

Circular economy in Architecture, Engineering, and Construction requires consideration in the design, deconstruction-planning, and waste management. This paper aims to develop a Framework to evaluate the material sustainability of buildings by comparing the proportionality of costs to environmental impacts of construction waste flows. Therefore, an...

The Architecture, Engineering, and Construction industries are allocated 40–60% of the worldwide raw material extraction. Construction waste accounts for a significant share of the total waste volume. Therefore, careless handling reduces natural resources and waste deposits (landfills). Furthermore, material reuse and recycling can reduce resource...

The construction sector consumes high amounts of resources and energy while generating significant amounts of waste. This development is contrary to Circular Economy principles, which require buildings that are resource and energy efficient and enable material recycling to the greatest possible extent. To effectively tackle this problem, the EU pla...

Within the new policy framework shaped by the EU Green Deal and the Circular Economy Action Plans, the field of wastewater and sludge treatment in Europe is subject to high expectations and new challenges related to mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions, micropollutant removal and resource recovery. With respect to phosphorus recovery, several tec...

To conserve resources and enhance the environmental performance, China has launched the “Zero waste” concept, focused on reutilization of solid waste and recovery of materials, including copper. Although several studies have assessed the copper demand and recycling, there is a lack of understanding on how different waste management options would po...

Building age maps inventory the construction dates of buildings. While many cities routinely map the construction dates of present building stocks, building age maps of the distant past are mostly not available. An exception is the building age map of Vienna around 1920. It covers about 80% of the building footprint area within the city boundary in...

The concept of Circular Economy has made a crucial contribution to establishing a changed perspective on recycling, one in which recycling is no longer regarded as merely a part of waste management, but rather intimately linked with preceding stages of production, such as product design and manufacturing. It has been shown that recycling achievemen...

Global steel production has undergone massive growth since WWII. In recent decades, however, affluent regions such as the US and the EU-28 have been experiencing a saturation of the steel market. Stagnant steel production volumes and increased post-consumer scrap volumes are the consequence. The increasing shares of post-consumer scrap provide the...

Recent years came with a paradigm shift for wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) to extend the sole purpose of contaminant removal to an additional function as resource recovery facilities. This shift is accompanied by the development of new European legislation towards better inclusion of resource recovery from wastewater. However, long operational...

The European automotive sector is faced with potentially disruptive challenges. In particular, the projected increase in the share of electric vehicles (EVs) and calls to prepare for the implementation of more circular economy (CE) strategies are increasingly demanding systemic adaptations. Given the goals of the CE, the adaptations should enable a...

Zusammenfassung Statistische Entropie kann zur Bewertung von unterschiedlichen Verfahren der Abfallwirtschaft herangezogen werden. Führt das Verfahren zu einer Separierung und damit Konzentrierung einzelner Materialien oder Stoffe, so entspricht dies einer niedrigen Statistischen Entropie, kommt es jedoch zu einer Vermischung und Verdünnung, erhöht...

Indium is crucial for many emerging technologies and is deemed to be critical by many nations. China has been a leading producer of indium, accounting for 46% of global primary indium production from 2000 to 2018, and meanwhile it is becoming a main consumer of indium. This study used dynamic material flow analysis to quantify China's indium cycle...

Multilevel statistical entropy analysis (SEA) is a method that has been recently proposed to evaluate circular economy strategies on the material, component and product levels to identify critical stages of resource and functionality losses. However, the comparison of technological alternatives may be difficult, and equal entropies do not necessari...

A successful transition to a Circular Economy, as promoted by the European Commission, requires solid information on the future availability of anthropogenic resources. Anthropogenic resources are human-made material stocks and flows, such as old landfills, buildings or different waste streams. A case study approach was adopted in this paper to inv...

Current use and management of phosphorus (P) in our food systems is considered unsustainable and considerable improvements in the efficiency of P use are required to mitigate the environmental impact of poor P stewardship. The inherent low P use efficiency of food production from animals means food systems dominated by livestock agriculture can pos...

Mercury (Hg) in the anthroposphere and its emission into the environment have been increasingly attracting attention. It is agreed upon that a substantial share of Hg is caused by anthropogenic activities. Comprehensive insight into Hg flows is crucial to minimizing exposure risk to humans and the environment. This study is the first to put togethe...

The successful implementation of sustainable resource management strategies depends on the availability of indicators that are capable of reflecting system complexity adequately but can easily be computed and communicated. However, systematic assessment of the scope and limits of simple indicators is often lacking. In the present study two indicato...

In a circular economy (CE), materials, components and products should be kept at the highest level of functionality, while phenomena like dilution, mixing and contamination, often referred to as the loss of resources, should be avoided. One method that can assess the performance of systems to concentrate or avoid dilution of resources is Statistica...

Zusammenfassung Die zunehmende Verschmutzung von aquatischen und terrestrischen Ökosystemen mit Mikroplastik stellt ein ernstzunehmendes Umweltproblem dar, wobei insbesondere die hohe Widerstandfähigkeit von Kunststoffen gegenüber Abbauprozessen zu einer stetigen Anreicherung von Mikroplastik in der Umwelt führt. Für die Bewertung der bereits vorha...

Thin film photovoltaic technologies are playing an increasingly important role in the transition to a low carbon economy. Their extensive deployment will require large amounts of raw materials, especially those of companion metals. Concerns about whether the availability of materials will impede the development of low-carbon technologies have led t...

With the proposed Circular Economy Package, the European Union is striving to play a leading role in the implementation of recycling goals. The significantly increased recycling targets are just some of the defined objectives. However, to assess the Member States' attainment of the new recycling targets, the European Union still builds on a purely...

Plastics are crucial for our modern lifestyle and yet pose a major threat to our environment. Rising levels of microplastics (MP) in rivers and oceans are a big challenge for our economy and regulatory institutions as well as from a scientific point of view. Smaller microplastic particles, in particular, are especially hard to identify and even har...

Circular economy is currently characterized by various definitions, measurement approaches, and critical analyses thereof coexisting alongside each other. Whether the concept eventually prevails or collapses will depend to some extent on our success in harmonizing assessment methods among public, scientific, and private institutions, as well as acr...

By combining an economic two-sector general equilibrium model with a material flow model we study the coupled human-resource-environment feedbacks associated with phosphorus use and recycling, and the economic and environmental effects of implementing phosphorus recovering technologies from waste water. Using recycled phosphorus as fertilizer incre...

European Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) industry consumes a significant amount of materials like steel, aluminum, copper and plastics, thus creating a large reservoir on secondary raw materials in buildings. One of the main strategies to minimize environmental impacts and the energy consumption is maximizing recycling rates. To en...

A major fraction of building materials is transformed into waste at the end of a building's life cycle. For sustainability reasons, it is of importance to maintain or recycle urban stocks, and in consequence to minimise the use of primary resources, wherefore a Material Passport (MP) represents an important support-tool. A MP acts as a design optim...

Concerns about increasing global consumption of non-renewable resources as well as shortages of primary raw materials and reduction of space available for final disposal of wastes are raising important issues for the society. Additionally, the minimisation of resources consumption belongs to the main concerns of EU, resulting in development of stra...

Minimisation of resources consumption belongs to the main concerns of EU, resulting in the development of strategies for maximizing recycling rates in order to minimize environmental impacts and energy consumption caused by extraction of primary materials. Detailed knowledge about the embedded materials as well as their characteristics of building...

de Die Bauindustrie zählt zu den größten Verbrauchern von Rohmaterialien und ist für 40 % des CO2‐Ausstoßes verantwortlich, was eine dringende Optimierung im Sinne der Nachhaltigkeit notwendig macht. Die Steigerung von Recyclingraten in der Baubranche ist daher eine der Hauptstrategien der EU, um den Ressourcenverbrauch sowie die ökologischen Einfl...

Building stocks and infrastructures are representing the largest material stock of industrial economies, whereby the largest fraction of building materials is transformed into waste at the end of the life cycle. In order to optimize the recycling potential of buildings, new design-tools and methods are required, whereby it is of utmost importance t...

Considerable efforts are undertaken to make the transition towards a more Circular Economy (CE). At the same time there is no generally accepted monitoring framework. Rather, what exists is a large variety of measurement approaches that aim to assess the progress. The different assessment methodologies cover different and varied aspects of the CE t...

Vorratsklassifikation hat im Bergbau eine lange Tradition und dient der systematischen Kategorisierung von mineralischen Ressourcen in Lagerstätten. Damit werden Informationsgrundlagen geschaffen um Bergbauunternehmen und Investoren einen Überblick über die Entwicklung ihres Projektportfolios zu geben, und staatlichen Einrichtungen eine nationale R...

Securing the future supply of materials is fundamental for economic development and prosperity. While the use of primary raw materials still dominates in terms of quantity, secondary raw materials are increasingly important for the diversification of sources. However, the stakeholders striving for a circular economy lack harmonized information on m...

The tremendous increase in resource consumption over the past century and the environmental challenges it entails has spurred discussions for a shift from a linear to a circular resource use. However, to date most resource studies are restricted to one material or a single sector or process. In this work, a coupled material flow analysis taking the...

Today different types of wastes are used as refuse-derived fuels (RDF) either in waste-to-energy plants or as fuel substitutes in energy-intensive industrial processes. In order to quantify their greenhouse-gas relevance (fossil carbon content), reliable and practical analytical methods are required, which allow differentiation between biogenic and...

The presentation introduces the application of the United Nations Framework Classification for Resources (UNFC) to antropogenic resources. It also demonstrates the linkage between UNFC and the Chinese National Resource Classification System.

Phosphorus mining from phosphate rock is associated with economic as well as environmental concerns. Through phosphorus recovery from municipal wastewater, countries could decrease their dependency on the global phosphate rock market, however, conceivably leading to an increase in environmental impacts from fertilizer production. In this work 18 ph...

Mastic asphalt (MA) is an important construction material mainly used for infrastructure pavements as well as industrial and garage floors. As mastic asphalt construction sites are often limited in space, the prevalent form of construction is by manual paving. Therefore, the emissions caused by mastic asphalt are not only relevant for the environme...

Der Einsatz von alternativen Brennstoffen – wie aus Abfall hergestellte Ersatzbrennstoffe (EBS) – kann in industriellen thermischen Verwertungsanlagen (beispielsweise in Zementwerken) neben der Einsparung von Primärrohstoffen auch zu einer Reduzierung der klimarelevanten CO2-Emissionen führen. Um diese CO2-Einsparungen nachzuweisen, bedarf es einer...

In a resource efficient economy, entropy generation must be kept low and high-entropy wastes should be transformed into low-entropy recycled products, thus saving natural resources. Based on this idea, statistical entropy analysis (SEA) was put forward as a method to evaluate material flow systems with respect to their ability to concentrate or dil...

A global aluminium flow modelling tool, comprising nine trade linked regions, namely China, Europe, Japan, Middle East, North America, Other Asia, Other Producing Countries, South America and Rest of World, has been developed. The purpose of the Microsoft Excel-based tool is the quantification of regional stocks and flows of rolled, extruded and ca...

Decision-makers traditionally expect “hard facts” from scientific inquiry, an expectation the results of Material Flow Analyses (MFAs) can hardly meet. MFA limitations are attributable to incompleteness of flowcharts, limited data quality, and model assumptions. Moreover, MFA results are mostly less based on empirical observation and rather on soci...

Closing regional material cycles by efficient use of secondary raw materials is a prioritized goal of European politics and industry. The extent to which material cycles may be closed at a regional level has, however, hardly been investigated so far, and mostly without consideration of material quality. Thus, in the present study quality aspects of...

Material Flow Analysis (MFA) is a useful method for modeling, understanding, and optimizing sociometabolic systems. Among others, MFAs can be distinguished by two general system properties: First, they differ in their complexity, which depends on system structure and size. Second, they differ in their inherent uncertainty, which arises from limited...

Ausgangssituation/Motivation: Der städtische Bergbau (Urban Mining) versteht Gebäude, Infrastrukturen und Deponien (Landfill Mining) als Reservoir für die Produktion von Sekundärrohstoffen. Die Infrastrukturen für Energie, Wasser und Information stellen ein beträchtliches, aber wenig bekanntes Rohstoffpotential dar. Ein Ressourcenkataster würde die...

Interdisciplinary research and education programmes in water science are intended to produce groundbreaking research, often with an emphasis on societal relevance, and prepare future water resource experts to work across disciplines. This paper explores the emerging outcomes from an ongoing doctoral programme currently in its seventh year. Within t...

Features: - Continues to serve as the only book on material flow analysis (MFA) - Updates information concerning MFA/SFA development - Includes software STAN and links to STAN2WEB - Contains new case studies about resource management and waste management - Provides a fresh, data-based treatment of uncertainty Summary: Since the first issue of the h...

Urban mining is seen as a key strategy for the recovery of secondary raw materials from the built environment. Although large material stocks have been reported in infrastructure networks, their actual recoverability over time has received little attention so far. This article presents a case study on the prospection and exploration of the anthropo...

Supporting Information S2: This supporting information provides descriptions of flows, stocks, transfer coefficients and equations for their calculation, and data sources.

Supporting Information S4: This supporting information displays the degree of impact that reconciliation has had on the whole system.

Supporting Information S1: This supporting information provides visualizations of the MFA model subsystems.

Supporting Information S3: This supporting information characterizes data uncertainty.

Plastics have been increasingly used in a wide range of applications, generating important waste streams, but overall information on their flows through society is generally not available. Therefore, the national plastic flows in Austria were analyzed and quantified from the production stage up to the waste management stage, for the reference year...

A method for quantitative evaluation of data quality in regional material flow analysis (MFA) is presented. The principal idea is that data quality is a multidimensional problem that cannot be judged by individual characteristics such as the data source, given that data from official statistics may not be per se of good quality and expert estimatio...

Cities and human settlements are complex and fascinating entities in various aspects. Urbanization is growing globally, such that cities become denser areas by the hour. This not only applies to the number of people in a city, but also to two significant aspects of the urban building stock: On the one hand the building related energy demand and the...

Protecting water bodies from eutrophication, ensuring long-term food security and shifting to a circular economy represent compelling objectives to phosphorus management strategies. This study determines how and to which extent the management of phosphorus in Austria can be optimized. A detailed national model, obtained for the year 2013 through Ma...

The furnace campaign of a blast furnace represents an important factor for the iron-making industry due to the fact that maintenance such as relining is not only costly but also time consuming. The furnace campaign is largely determined by the functionality of the lining, which is influenced by wear mechanisms and the damaging behavior of certain e...

A reliable and practical method for characterizing refuse-derived fuels (RDF) with respect to greenhouse gas-relevance (or biomass content) is required by industries and waste management companies. As RDF usually consist of a variety of materials with different physical properties, sampling and sample preparation may represent crucial steps with re...

Although thermal recovery of waste plastics is widely practiced in many European countries, reliable information on the amount of waste plastics in the feed of waste-to-energy plants is rare. In most cases the amount of plastics present in commingled waste, such as municipal solid waste, commercial, or industrial waste, is estimated based on a few...

Material flow analysis (MFA) is a tool to quantify the flows and stocks of materials in arbitrarily complex systems. MFA has been widely applied to material systems in providing useful information regarding the patterns of resource use and the losses of materials entering the environment. MFA and life cycle assessment (LCA) are traditionally differ...

Da brennbare Abfälle zumeist ein Gemisch aus biogenen (z. B. Papier, Holz, Küchenabfälle) und fossilen Materialien (Kunststoffe) darstellen, entstehen bei ihrer thermischen Verwertung sowohl klimaneutrale als auch klimarelevante CO2-Emissionen. Analog verhält es sich auch bei der erzeugten Energie (Strom), die entsprechend dem jeweiligen Biomassege...

Der globale Stoffhaushalt wird immer weniger von natürlichen Prozessen, sondern vielmehr von anthropogenen Vorgängen dominiert. Ökologische und ökonomische Nachhaltigkeit schließen auch den effizienten Umgang mit Rohstoffen ein. Die detaillierte Kenntnis nationaler Stoffströme in Form von Rohstoffbilanzen oder – über die Zeit fortgeschrieben – in F...

Phosphorus (P) is an essential and limited resource. Municipal wastewater is a promising source of P via reuse and could be used to replace P derived from phosphate rocks. The agricultural use of sewage sludge is restricted by legislation or is not practiced in several European countries due to environmental risks posed by organic micropollutants a...