According to Article 21(4) of the Waste Framework Directive (2008/98/EC), the Commission is required to consider the feasibility of adopting measures for the treatment of waste oils, in particular further measures to promote waste oil regeneration. In 2017, of the approximately 4.3 Mt lubricating oils placed on the market in the EU-28, 2 Mt (47%) are potentially collectible. Of the 1.6 Mt collected waste oils, about 61% were estimated to be regenerated and 39% followed energy recovery pathways, such as conversion to fuel or incineration in industrial boilers and hazardous waste incineration plants. The first part of this study applies life cycle assessment 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 latter case, regeneration - depending on the specific technology and context - is superior or comparable to treatment to fuel, and only clearly superior to direct incineration (in cement kilns, in hazardous waste incinerators and in industrial boilers). 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. Net employment creation would be limited, namely to 124 jobs by 2045 in the EU as a whole, although some Member States could be affected by job losses due to the geographical heterogeneity of the employment dynamics. 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. These benefits are rather moderate and do not always exceed the estimated administrative costs, which would make it questionable whether this would justify a policy intervention to move waste oil from energy recovery to regeneration.
