Life cycle assessment (LCA) of waste management strategies: Landfilling, sorting plant and incineration

This paper focuses on a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) of four waste management strategies: landfill without biogas utilization; landfill with biogas combustion to generate electricity; sorting plant which splits the inorganic waste fraction (used to produce electricity via Refuse Derived Fuels, RDF) from the organic waste fraction (used to produce biogas via anaerobic digestion); direct incineration of waste. These scenarios are applied to the waste amount and composition of the Municipality of Roma (Italy) and are evaluated under different points of view: global and local emissions, total material demands, total energy requirements and ecological footprints. Results, reliable for most of the European big cities, show landfill systems as the worst waste management options and significant environmental savings at global scale are achieved from undertaking energy recycling. Furthermore, waste treatments finalized to energy recovery provide an energy output that, in the best case, is able to meet the 15% of Roma electricity consumption.

[1]  Bernd Bilitewski,et al.  Comparative evaluation of life cycle assessment models for solid waste management. , 2007 .

[2]  Michael Hauschild,et al.  Product specific emissions from municipal solid waste landfills , 1998 .

[3]  Lars-Gunnar Lindfors,et al.  On the nordic guidelines for life cycle assessment , 1996 .

[4]  Roland Clift,et al.  The application of Life Cycle Assessment to Integrated Solid Waste Management - Part 1 - Methodology , 2000 .

[5]  S Consonni,et al.  Alternative strategies for energy recovery from municipal solid waste Part B: Emission and cost estimates. , 2005, Waste management.

[6]  Michael Narodoslawsky,et al.  Integrated ecological optimization of processes with the sustainable process index , 2000 .

[7]  Shaohua Wu,et al.  Experimental study on effects of moisture content on combustion characteristics of simulated municipal solid wastes in a fixed bed. , 2008, Bioresource technology.

[8]  Maria Laura Mastellone,et al.  THE ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE OF ALTERNATIVE SOLID WASTE MANAGEMENT OPTIONS: A LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT STUDY , 2003 .

[9]  Christian Krotscheck.  Measuring eco-sustainability: comparison of mass and/or energy flow based highly aggregated indicators , 1997 .

[10]  Michael Narodoslawsky,et al.  SPIonExcel—Fast and easy calculation of the Sustainable Process Index via computer , 2007 .

[11]  Michael Narodoslawsky,et al.  The Sustainable Process Index a new dimension in ecological evaluation , 1996 .

[12]  Tahir Husain,et al.  GreenPro-I: a risk-based life cycle assessment and decision-making methodology for process plant design , 2002, Environ. Model. Softw..

[13]  Torbjörn Rydberg,et al.  Emergy analysis of municipal wastewater treatment and generation of electricity by digestion of sewage sludge , 2001 .

[14]  Silvia Bargigli,et al.  Life cycle assessment of urban waste management: energy performances and environmental impacts. The case of Rome, Italy. , 2008, Waste management.

[15]  Göran Finnveden,et al.  Methodological aspects of life cycle assessment of integrated solid waste management systems , 1999 .

[16]  Stefan Salhofer,et al.  Landfill modelling in LCA - a contribution based on empirical data. , 2007, Waste management.

[17]  L. Ruth,et al.  Energy from municipal solid waste : A comparison with coal combustion technology , 1998 .

[18]  G. Finnveden,et al.  Nord 1995:20: Nordic guidelines on life-cycle assessment , 1995 .

[19]  Turgut T Onay,et al.  Comparison of aerobic and anaerobic degradation of municipal solid waste in bioreactor landfills. , 2008, Bioresource technology.

[20]  Sven Erik Jørgensen,et al.  Handbook of Ecological Indicators for Assessment of Ecosystem Health , 2007 .

[21]  Silvia Bargigli,et al.  Overcoming the inadequacy of single-criterion approaches to Life Cycle Assessment , 2006 .

[22]  Forbes R McDougall,et al.  Integrated Solid Waste Management: A Lifecycle Inventory , 1995 .

[23]  Sergio Ulgiati.  2 Energy , Emergy and Embodied Exergy : diverging or converging approaches ? , 2009 .

[24]  R. Frischknecht,et al.  Implementation of Life Cycle Impact Assessment Methods. ecoinvent report No. 3, v2.2 , 2010 .

[25]  Antonio Casimiro Caputo,et al.  RDF production plants: I Design and costs , 2002 .

[26]  K Kylefors,et al.  Evaluation of leachate composition by multivariate data analysis (MVDA). , 2003, Journal of environmental management.

[27]  H. Bjarnadottir,et al.  Guidelines for the use of LCA in the waste management sector , 2002 .

[28]  Ying-Hsi Chang,et al.  Comparative evaluation of RDF and MSW incineration , 1998 .

[29]  M. Berglund,et al.  Assessment of energy performance in the life-cycle of biogas production , 2006 .

[30]  Anna Björklund,et al.  What life-cycle assessment does and does not do in assessments of waste management. , 2007, Waste management.

[31]  Jyh-Cherng Chen,et al.  Emission characteristics of PAHs, benzene and phenol group hydrocarbons in O2/RFG waste incineration processes , 2008 .