Two of the biggest problems we have today are the global waste crisis and climate change, and we need a material revolution to manage both. Companies are setting strong objectives to use recycled material in products. As a result, consumers, end users, NGOs, and other stakeholders place greater emphasis on brands’ environmental and weather performances.
How do brands achieve these important objectives? An excellent start is with traditional recycling, often called mechanical recycling. Mechanical recycling involves cleaning, chopping, and melting plastic to create recycled plastic. Another option is the mass balance approach, a crucial mechanism to launch the widespread phase-out of fossil raw materials to achieve a fully transformed chemical industry. A gradual shift to use recycled or renewable feedstock is made possible by the mass balance approach.
Read the complete article and understand the mass balance approach in recycling.
What Is Mass Balance Approach?
Using a mass balanc approach, we can combine renewable and recycled energy sources with fossil fuels in our current systems while tracking their quantities and allocating them to goods. Although the product’s real carbon molecules might not be recycled or renewed, the quantity is confirmed through a third-party certificate. This enables the reduction of CO2 emissions and supports sustainable sourcing of recycled and renewable raw materials.
In the energy industry, the mass balance approach is a well-known methodology for producing electricity. Therefore, every item you receive in the future will originate from a sustainable source, and eventually, all raw materials will come from renewable resources.
What Is A Mass Balance Chain Of Custody?
The mass balance approach is a chain of possession that tracks the net number of sustainable materials moving through a system or supply chain. At the same time, ensuring an accurate allocation of these resources to the completed good based on auditable bookkeeping.
In an industrial process, mass balance permits the mixing of sustainable and non-sustainable materials; nevertheless, the mass of the system’s inputs and outputs is measured while simultaneously taking the efficiency of the process into account.
How Does Mass Balance Approach Characteristics Allocation Work?
The intricacy of the mass balance approach lies in its capacity to assign varying amounts of a characteristic to the products, regardless of the process’s actual chemical makeup. This mechanism will produce goods derived from a 50/50 split of sustainable and virgin materials if there are 50/50 sustainable and virgin materials used. On the other hand, a mass balance approach permits materials to be distributed virtually among some goods if the percentage of input characteristics is mirrored overall in the output.
Benefits Of The Mass Balance Approach
The mass balance approach enables diverse businesses to start pursuing the smooth shift to more environmentally friendly practices and resource utilization. This is vital when setting up separate processes for using sustainable and raw materials or when it is impossible to make a significant operational change in a single step.
- Promoting a systemic shift to a circular economy– Circularity is a collective action. You may move closer to common circularity goals by encouraging more businesses to adopt more sustainable materials.
- Promotes incremental change and development – One benefit of the mass balance approach is that it enables the business to influence the fight against climate change immediately. The mass balance, therefore, accelerates the reduction of GHG emissions. More sustainable solutions can be gradually implemented.
- Making the transition to meet recycled content and net goals- Mass balance approach is an efficient technique to raise both the recycled and renewable content of products, resulting in a smaller climate and environmental impact throughout their lifecycle.
- Providing businesses and consumers with the information they need- Mass balance certification helps convince customers that product claims are supported by evidence. To keep individuals throughout the channel from making false claims, tracking can offer visibility to the final consumer with verified sustainability standards.
Sustainable Transformation With Known SuppliersÂ
To make a constant transformation to sustainability, the plastics and chemicals industries can use the mass balance approach as a convenient tool. However, to decide how exactly to use the mass balance approach, many factors must be considered, as stated above. We recommend getting in touch with leading service providers who can address all your needs with ease.Â
