Environmental Impact Assessment of Copper‐Alloy Production Using Process Simulation and Semantic Modeling

In this research, how environmental impacts of products can be tracked through complex production networks based on semantic data and environmental impact calculations is demonstrated. It focuses on the example of secondary copper production and the subsequent production of copper alloys, namely bronze and brass. The adopted methodology and ontology can however be generalized to other products and environmental impact categories. In this study, HSC Sim and FactSage software are employed to model and simulate the copper alloy production process from copper scrap (CuScrap) and waste‐printed circuit boards (WPCBs) and an ontology to represent the results for individual process parts is developed in a way that impact assessment is possible for all materials in a complex process network. Life cycle assessment (LCA), focused on greenhouse gas emissions (global warming potential [GWP]), is conducted using OpenLCA software and the ecoinvent 3.8 database to evaluate the environmental impacts comprehensively. In the GWP results, variations across all the studied cases are indicated, with bronze production generally exhibiting higher impacts, i.e., 33.46%, 32.33%, and 32.41% for Scrap, Mix, and printed circuit board cases, respectively, as compared to brass production due to the presence of tin (in bronze) which exhibits 3.7 times higher emissions than zinc (present in brass).