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Modular life cycle assessment of municipal solid waste management
1ETH Zurich, Institute of Environmental Engineering, John-von-Neumann Weg 9, CH-8093 Zurich, Switzerland.
Waste Management (New York, N.Y.)
|June 5, 2018
Summary
A new modular material flow analysis (MFA)/life cycle assessment (LCA) framework provides a systems perspective for waste management. It reveals that for advanced systems, focusing on secondary material use and energy recovery is more impactful than increasing recycling rates.
Area of Science:
- Environmental Science
- Industrial Ecology
- Waste Management
Background:
- Traditional Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) for waste management often lacks a systems perspective due to limited system boundaries.
- Existing assessments frequently focus on specific waste treatments or a fixed amount of material, hindering a holistic environmental performance evaluation.
- A comprehensive understanding of waste management impacts requires integrating material flows with environmental consequences.
Purpose of the Study:
- To propose and validate a novel framework for assessing complete waste management systems.
- To enable detailed environmental impact assessment of waste management by linking Material Flow Analysis (MFA) with LCA.
- To evaluate the environmental performance of different waste management scenarios and identify key influencing factors.
Main Methods:
- Development of a modular MFA/LCA approach, transforming MFA data into a product-process-matrix for direct LCA integration.
- Creation of 190 LCA modules using primary industrial data and the ecoinvent database for geographically specific and up-to-date assessments.
- Case study application to the Swiss municipal solid waste management system, analyzing five different mass flow distribution scenarios.
Main Results:
- The modular MFA/LCA approach successfully models complete waste management systems and assesses flow variations.
- Case study results indicate that while metals have high per-kilogram impact, paper, cardboard, glass, and mixed waste dominate overall impacts due to mass.
- Environmental performance is sensitive to the energy efficiency of waste incineration and credits from material substitution; closed-loop recycling is not universally superior.
Conclusions:
- For advanced waste management systems, increasing recycling rates offers limited environmental improvement potential.
- Political measures should prioritize utilizing secondary materials in applications displacing high-impact primary production.
- Enhanced energy recovery in waste-to-energy plants is crucial for improving the environmental performance of mature waste management systems.
Keywords:
Energy recoveryIndirect energyLife cycle assessment (LCA)Material flow analysis (MFA)Policy scenarioRecyclingMore Related Videos
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