A life cycle approach for environmental assessment of waste management strategies

Population growth, rapid urbanization, and industrialization have highly led to an ever-growing waste generation. This can potentially threaten human life and the environment. Under such circumstances, waste management (WM) provides an opportunity to deal with related issues. This paper aimed to perform an environmental assessment of municipal solid waste disposal strategies through the application of life cycle assessment (LCA). Aradkuh waste disposal center in Tehran, Iran, was selected as the case study system due to existing environmental problems. On this basis, three different scenarios were carefully defined: the base scenario (current strategy), the 1st scenario (zero direct landfilling) and the 2nd scenario (zero landfilling). The base scenario is the current waste disposal strategy and was considered to be environmentally analyzed. The results indicated that decreasing the amount of direct landfilling could significantly yield many environmental benefits. The impact of global warming as a global serious crisis could noticeably be mitigated in the 1st and 2nd scenario by 2171.1 ton CO2 eq and 2948.7 ton CO2 eq respectively. Besides, using waste incineration instead of landfilling dominantly resulted in high environmental benefits. However, incineration seemed to have a destructive performance in most of the toxicity related impact categories.

کلیدواژه ها:

waste management ، life cycle assessment ، environmental impact