Material Flow Cost Accounting (MFCA) is a method of economic assessment, most often used to study and optimise manufacturing processes in corporate production facilities. It provides several advantages over conventional cost accounting as it can assign energy, system and waste management costs to material losses. Therefore, it highlights the financial cost of material losses and inefficiencies in a process and demonstrates the benefits of effective resource use and waste reduction during process design.

MFCA has been used in a novel way in this study to economically assess a process for the recovery of critical materials (IRETA2 Project). This study describes the process, outcomes, and overall benefits of implementing MFCA for the economic assessment compared to conventional cost accounting. The Project is divided into six clear quantity centres based on the technological recycling process where input energy, materials, equipment, output material, byproducts and wastes are defined, quantified and valued. From the results of this study, the optimal cost point of primary sourced tantalum that would deem recycling tantalum economically favourable is determined and the importance of recovery and selling by-products on the overall economic feasibility of the recycling process demonstrated.

Keywords: Economic Assessment, Material Flow Cost Accounting, Tantalum

Acknowledgements: The authors gratefully acknowledge the financial support by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research of Germany in the framework of “IRETA 2” (project number 033RK080H).