Apart from the technical work carried out within the HEPHAESTUS project, which aims to develop near-zero-waste recycling technologies for EAF and AOD dusts, another important part of the project is understanding whether these technologies are environmentally and economically sustainable. This is done through Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) and Techno-Economic Assessment (TEA) by HEPHAESTUS partner AdMiRIS.
Financial Sustainability Project Manager from AdMiRIS, Paraskevi Efstathiou, leads the project's Techno-Economic Assessment (TEA), while Chemical Engineer Athina Preveniou is responsible for the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA).
The TEA focuses on the economic feasibility of the technologies. It evaluates whether the developed processes can become commercially viable by analysing capital and operating costs, expected revenues and profitability. To do this, Paraskevi calculates several financial indicators that help understand if a technology could realistically succeed outside the laboratory. These include Net Present Value (NPV), which shows whether the project is expected to generate more value than it costs, Internal Rate of Return (IRR), which estimates the expected return on the investment, Return on Invested Capital (ROIC), showing how efficiently the invested money is used, and Payback Period (PBP), indicating how long it would take to recover the initial investment. In addition, sensitivity analyses are carried out to see how changes in key assumptions, such as metal prices, operating costs or production capacity, could affect the business case.
The LCA evaluates the environmental performance of the HEPHAESTUS technologies throughout their life cycle. One important part of the work is comparing the HEPHAESTUS processes with the conventional Waelz process, which is the current state of the art technology for zinc recovery from steelmaking dusts. By assessing several environmental impact categories, the study identifies environmental hotspots and quantifies where the HEPHAESTUS technologies can bring improvements.
Athina analyses both the benefits and the challenges of the developed technologies compared to currently used industrial practice. She looks at key factors such as energy and water consumption, emissions, waste generation and waste valorisation. In this way, the project can quantify the environmental footprint of the new technologies and compare it with existing solutions used by industry today.
Together, the environmental and economic assessments give a much more complete picture of the HEPHAESTUS technologies. Besides demonstrating that a process works technically, they help understand whether this new technology is really better from environmental point of view, whether it is economically realistic, and what should be improved before industrial implementation.
About AdMiRIS
HEPHAESTUS partner AdMiRIS (Advanced Minerals and Recycling Industrial Solutions) is a Greek research and engineering company specialising in sustainable mineral processing, industrial process optimisation, circular economy solutions and resource recovery. The company combines research with industrial implementation and provides expertise in Techno-Economic Assessment (TEA), Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), environmental footprinting, eco-design, sustainable supply chains and environmental communication. Its mission is to develop innovative technologies that improve resource efficiency and support the transition towards a circular economy.
To learn more about AdMiRIS, visit: https://www.admiris.eu/