Environmental and socio-economic sustainability of waste lubricant oil management in the EU

The first part of this study applies life cycle analysis and life cycle costing methods to assess the impacts of eight alternative scenarios (pathways) for the management of 1 tonne of waste oil with certain physico-chemical properties, including three regeneration pathways (hydro-treatment, solvent extraction and distillation) and five energy recovery pathways (two types of distillation into fuel oil, direct incineration in cement kilns, direct incineration in hazardous waste incinerators and direct incineration in industrial boilers). Whereas regeneration outperforms all energy recovery pathways from a climate change perspective, the results are more nuanced when considering the societal life cycle costs, i.e. the sum of internal and external costs (monetised environmental emissions). In the second part of this study, we analyse different policies to achieve higher regeneration rates in terms of their environmental and socio-economic impacts. In particular, we quantify the impacts of a 70% and an 85% regeneration target at EU level. Both targets indicate rather minor benefits. The 70% target leads to 0.6 Mt total CO2-equivalent savings and 124 million € net savings in terms of societal costs over the period 2024-2045. For the 85% target, CO2-equivalent savings amount to 1.7 Mt, net savings in terms of societal costs to 330 million € (both over the period 2024-2045) and net employment creation to 329 jobs by 2045.