Impact of recycling improvement on the life cycle of phosphorus

Access to natural resources is increasingly more difficult and more costly, partly due to their economic significance and to continuous increase of their global consumption in the recent years. In the case of phosphorus (P), which is a critical raw material, geological distribution of its primary nonrenewable source (phosphate rock) is concentrated in particular regions leading to high supply risk of this raw material. In Europe (EU-28), where phosphate rock reserves are scarce, import of phosphorus has been the main source of supply. It means that Europe relies highly on the foreign exporters. From decision makers' perspective, recycling of phosphorus was taken into account as one of the possible solutions to decrease the dependence on imports and extraction of reserves. The question, however, is to what extent does the recycling of phosphorus help in reducing the reliance on typical supply resources? Hence, the main objective of this paper is to quantify the dynamic flow of phosphorus and show potential benefits of its recycling in Europe. This article presents a system dynamics model for representation of the element P flow and helps to quantify to what extent the recycled phosphorus could mitigate its criticality. Analysis of the results supports previous studies indicating the high reliance of EU on P imports, estimating around 96% as the reliance percentage on imports. The results imply that improving P recycling has the potential to decrease the level of P imports to a certain extent, which may reach 79%.