NDLI: The incorporation of waste prevention activities into life cycle assessments of municipal solid waste management systems: methodological issues

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Cleary, Julian
Copyright Year	2010
Abstract	Municipal solid waste (MSW) management organizations commonly address both waste treatment and diversion activities in their management plans, yet the application of life cycle assessment (LCA) to MSW rarely incorporates the effects of waste prevention activities (WPAs) in an explicit manner. The primary objective of this paper is to further develop the methodological options for attributional LCAs of MSW to address waste prevention, including product reuse.This article introduces the waste management and prevention (WasteMAP) LCA, a conceptual model that applies system expansion to generate a hybrid of the traditional product and waste LCA. The WasteMAP LCA, unlike the traditional LCA of MSW, can be used to compare functionally equivalent MSW management scenarios incorporating both treatment and prevention. This functional equivalence necessitates that waste prevention takes place through dematerialization. This form of WPA is analogous to waste management techniques such as landfilling in that it does not affect the functional output (product services) of MSW-generating product systems.Integral to the WasteMAP LCA is the requirement that the sum of the MSW managed through treatment and prevention, and the level of consumption of product services contributing to MSW generation, are identical for each scenario. A partial abandonment of the zero-burden assumption is also required. Consequently, product life cycles associated with WPAs, excluding the waste treatment stages, comprise the ‘upstream’ component of the system boundary, while the ‘downstream’ component encompasses the waste treatment life cycle. WasteMAP also possesses primary and secondary functional units, with the former accounting for the amount of waste managed, and the latter depicting the product services provided by the product systems responsible for the waste targeted for prevention.The WasteMAP LCA method can be used to identify in the results the burdens and avoided burdens attributed to waste prevention, recycling, biological and thermal treatments, as well as landfilling, within a particular MSW management system. This method also distinguishes itself through its ability to evaluate scenarios that target the prevention of particular waste streams to obtain downstream efficiency gains for the management of all waste materials.An attributional LCA of MSW can be applied to a wider array of possible waste management scenarios, including those with waste prevention, by expanding the system boundary, and in the case of waste prevention through dematerialization, by introducing an additional type of functional unit.
Starting Page	579
Ending Page	589
Page Count	11
File Format	PDF
ISSN	09483349
Journal	The International Journal of Life Cycle Assessment
Volume Number	15
Issue Number	6
e-ISSN	16147502
Language	English
Publisher	Springer-Verlag
Publisher Date	2010-05-01
Publisher Place	Berlin, Heidelberg
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Life cycle assessment (LCA) LCA methodology Municipal solid waste (MSW) Waste management hierarchy WasteMAP (waste management and prevention) Waste prevention Environmental Economics Environment
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Environmental Science

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