Life-cycle assessment demonstrates mixed emissions reductions across spent catalyst recycling systems, indicating that environmental benefits depend on heat recovery and substitution potential.
This study evaluated resource circulation strategies for spent residue desulfurization (RDS) and propane dehydrogenation (PDH) catalysts within a common life-cycle assessment framework.For the RDS catalyst, the existing regeneration process was compared with an improved process that incorporated a heat-exchanger network redesign based on exergy and pinch analyses.For the PDH catalyst, recovered alumina was compared with virgin alumina on an equal mass basis.Using EF 3.1 and a cradle-to-gate boundary, the climate-change impact of the improved RDS process decreased from 19.83 to 18.39 kg CO 2 eq./kg, a 7.26% reduction.In contrast, recovered PDH alumina showed a climate-change impact of 14.45 kg CO 2 eq./kg, compared with 1.54 kg CO 2 eq./kg for virgin alumina, and higher impacts in all 14 comparable categories.Therefore, environmental benefits depend on energy and auxiliary material inputs, heat recovery, and substitution potential.However, the PDH result is preliminary because functional equivalence was not experimentally verified.
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Park et al. (2026) studied this question.
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