Using Life-Cycle Management to Evaluate Integrated Municipal Solid Waste Management Strategies

Developing more efficient integrated MSW management plans necessarily involves complex decisions where tradeoffs between environment performance and cost and must be carefully analyzed. For instance, how does the cost and environmental performance of a MSW management system change if we include or exclude a specific material (e.g., glass, paper, plastic, metal) from our recycling program? And should we recycle newsprint if we are interested in waste-to-energy combustion? To better evaluate the tradeoffs involved with these types of questions, the entire life cycle of MSW must be considered. As shown in Figure 1, the life cycle of MSW starts with the production of products from virgin and/or recycled materials. Eventually, these products are discarded to the MSW stream and may be managed through a variety of options such as recycling, combustion, composting, and landfilling. Materials that are recovered and recycled are incorporated into new products and will eventually reenter the MSW stream. By taking a life-cycle perspective, it is possible to capture tradeoffs and transfers of environmental burdens from one waste management operation to another, or from one life-cycle stage to another, and analyze multiple system design issues concurrently [2,3,4].