Regional environmental impacts from changing environmental legislation for co-processing of agrochemicals

Abstract

The enactment of the new CONAMA Resolution No. 499/2020 now authorizes the co-processing of agrochemical packaging and post-consumption leftovers, which were previously prohibited. Due to this issue, the reverse logistics of these packages, consolidated in Brazil for almost two decades, will suffer serious threats. The general objective of this work is to investigate the potential environmental impacts generated by the recent regulation, identifying the states, immediate and intermediate regions and municipalities that will be most affected by these legal changes. For this, a comparison of the impacts between the Campo Limpo System and co-processing was made through Life Cycle Assessment, considering as a functional unit the final destination of 45 thousand tons of packages and 100 tons of leftovers in a period of one year, using the ReCiPe method. The results proved that the potential impacts are lower by 12% in the climate change category, 7% in marine ecotoxicity, 2% in water ecotoxicity, and 1% for particulate matter formation, photochemical oxidant formation, and human toxicity in the Campo Limpo system. We conclude that the new CONAMA resolution will encourage environmental setbacks and will not contribute to the mitigation of any impact on disposal. The Metropolitan Mesoregion of Belo Horizonte and the municipality of Cantagalo-RJ will be the places that will suffer most from these impacts because they have the highest concentration of clinker ovens for co-processing in the national territory. The continuity of the Campo Limpo program is recommended as the best option for final disposal of this high environmental risk waste.

Keywords: Co-processing; Pesticides; Packaging; Reverse Logistics; Environmental Impacts.