Development of a Sustainable Copper Scrap Management Model

A copper scrap management model at a country level is proposed, taking into account every collected copper scrap stream, with its associated environmental impact and cost. The method is applied on the treatment of printed wiring boards (PWB) in France. Considering the initial physical properties and composition of this scrap, seven flowsheets are constructed to produce refined copper. Then, depending on the ratio of PWB treated in each processing chain, the production rate, energy consumption, operating cost and environmental impact are evaluated. Three bi-objective optimizations are conducted based on a multi-objective genetic algorithm of NSGA II version: production versus energy consumption, production versus operating cost and production versus environmental impact. Pareto fronts are obtained for each optimization that gives the set of non-dominated solutions.