Application of the US decision support tool for materials and waste management

Abstract

The US Environmental Protection Agency (US EPA) launched the Resource Conservation Challenge (RCC) in 2002 to help reduce waste and move towards more sustainable resource consumption. The objective of the RCC is to help communities, industries, and the public think in terms of materials management rather than waste disposal. Reducing cost, finding more efficient and effective strategies to manage municipal waste, and thinking in terms of materials management requires a holistic approach that considers life-cycle environmental tradeoffs. The US EPA's National Risk Management Research Laboratory has led the development of a municipal solid waste decision support tool (MSW-DST). The computer software can be used to calculate life-cycle environmental tradeoffs and full costs of different waste management or materials recovery programs. The environmental methodology is based on the use of life-cycle assessment and the cost methodology is based on the use of full-cost accounting. Life-cycle inventory (LCI) environmental impacts and costs are calculated from the point of collection, handling, transport, treatment, and disposal. For any materials that are recovered for recycling, offsets are calculated to reflect potential emissions savings from use of virgin materials. The use of the MSW-DST provides a standardized format and consistent basis to compare alternatives. This paper provides an illustration of how the MSW-DST can be used by evaluating ten management strategies for a hypothetical medium-sized community to compare the life-cycle environmental and cost tradeoffs. The LCI results from the MSW-DST are then used as inputs into another US EPA tool, the Tool for the reduction and assessment of chemical and other environmental impacts, to convert the LCI results into impact indicators. The goal of this paper is to demonstrate how the MSW-DST can be used to identify and balance multiple criteria (costs and environmental impacts) when evaluating options for materials and waste management. This type of approach is needed in identifying strategies that lead to reduced waste and more sustainable resource consumption. This helps to meet the goals established in the US EPA's Resource Conservation Challenge.

Is It Better To Burn or Bury Waste for Clean Electricity Generation?

“…LCI-based methods have been used to evaluate and compare solid waste management (SWM) unit operations and systems holistically to quantify either the environmental impacts or energy use associated with SWM options in the broad context of MSW management (14)(15)(16).…”

Comparison of energy and material recovery of household waste management from the environmental point of view – Case Kaunas, Lithuania

“…Several research groups [8][9][10][11] have studied the economy of the use of waste-derived fuels in energy production. LCA studies involving energy recovery have also been recently published by several research groups [12][13][14][15][16].…”

Compromising economic cost and air pollutant emissions of municipal solid waste management strategies by fuzzy multiobjective optimization model

“…Several LCA inventory and assessment tools have been developed for MSWM systems, and comparing environmental impacts for different MSWM strategies (Finnveden and Ekvall, 1998;Finnveden, 1999;Clift et al, 2000;Ekvall and Finnveden, 2000;Mendes et al, 2004;Eriksson et al, 2005;Thorneloe et al, 2007;Winkler and Bilitewski, 2007;Chen and Lin, 2008;Zhao et al, 2009). However, these studies only evaluated the environmental impact and emissions by inventory methods and assessment tools but with no estimation of economic feasibility.…”