The Use of Life Cycle Assessment Tools to Develop Sustainable Municipal Solid Waste Management Systems

Historically the main objectives of waste management have been to dispose of society’s waste and to protect public health. Increasing public awareness of environmental issues has added sustainability to this list. Solid waste management needs to be environmentally sustainable to reduce overall environmental burdens, and economically acceptable for all sectors of the community served. Integrated Waste Management (IWM) takes an overall approach to this, involves the use of a range of different treatment options and deals with the entire waste stream. The tool of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) can successfully be applied to assess the environmental burdens and economic costs associated with IWM systems. IWM supersedes the commonly referred to waste hierarchy, which only provides a simplistic framework to aid in the selection of different treatment options. The hierarchy cannot measure the effectiveness of potential solutions for specific locations, either economically or environmentally. LCA compiles detailed information on overall energy balance, final emissions to air and water and total economic costs of any particular waste management strategy. Several different waste management strategies can be compared, and from the resulting LCA data, informed decisions can be made based on economics and environmental burdens. This approach allows the determination of the best practical environmental option for total solid waste management in any specific geography. It must be emphasised that life cycle tools are decision support tools, not decision making tools. SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND WASTE MANAGEMENT So what is sustainable development – and what does it mean for waste managers as we move into the 21st Century? It’s been the subject of a recent World Summit in Johannesburg, and a topic that has been taken up widely by governments. The UK has a sustainable development strategy, and has just published its latest assessment report. At the European level we also have an EU Sustainability Strategy. An early problem was how to explain sustainability to the man in the street. Early definitions were complex, but the UK Government has developed a simple, yet aspirational description: “Sustainable Development is a simple idea. It is about ensuring a better quality of life for everyone, now and for generations to come”. For a country, sustainable development covers a whole range of “quality of life indicators”. The UK has 15 “headline indicators” which measure a range of aspects. There are 3 main areas in which indicators have been identified; economic measures like GDP, social aspects such as crime levels and educational achievement, and environmental areas such as river quality and biodiversity. In line with these three areas of sustainable development, solid waste management needs to be economically affordable socially acceptable and environmentally effective (see Figure 1). • Economic affordability requires that the costs of waste management systems are acceptable to all sectors of the community served, including householders, commerce, industry, institutions and government. • Social acceptability requires that the waste management system meets the needs of the local community, and reflects the values and priorities of that society. • Environmental effectiveness requires that the overall environmental burdens of managing waste are reduced, both in terms of consumption of resources (including energy) and the production of emissions to air, water and land.