Feasibility as a Deployment Trajectory in Resource Recovery Systems

Emerging resource recovery technologies are frequently assessed as economically or environmentally infeasible.However, many technologies later become competitive under different deployment conditions, while others that initially appear to be promising fail to achieve sustained implementation.Such inconsistencies are often interpreted as disagreement regarding technology performance.More fundamentally, however, they reflect a limitation in how feasibility itself is evaluated.Current sustainability assessment practices commonly rely on static techno-economic analysis (TEA) and life cycle assessment (LCA), where systems are evaluated under fixed deployment conditions regarding technological maturity (e.g., recovery efficiency and process reliability), implementation context (e.g., facility scale and local market), and enabling policies (e.g., tax credits and carbon incentives).These approaches remain indispensable for benchmarking systems