Model development of sustainability assessment from a life cycle perspective: A case study on waste management systems in China

Abstract

Due to the problems of municipal solid waste (MSW) during the expanding urbanization, strategy to find an environmentally friendly, energy efficient, cost-effective, and socially acceptable MSW management system is essential for sustainable development. This study establishes a novel environment-energyeconomy-society (3E þ S) model from a life cycle perspective for sustainability assessment: life cycle assessment for evaluating environmental performance and energy consumption, life cycle costing for recording economic burden, and social life cycle assessment for reflecting social impacts; based on the individual 3E þ S results, the final ranking of alternatives is obtained by multi-criteria decision making, which is integrated with analytic hierarchy process and entropy weight method. This model is implemented to identify a sustainable MSW management system among four typical treatment alternatives. Results show that incineration with fluidized bed furnace is the best choice in this study; incineration with moving grate furnace follows after with a slight gap; landfill with and without energy recovery rank the third and the last. The framework of SLCA on MSW field is built in this study and sensitivity analysis is provided for further discussion on social impacts. The calculation method of weight factors reduces man-made disturbances and the sensitivity analysis demonstrates strong robustness of the results and effectiveness of the modification for the model.

Quantitative sustainability assessment of household food waste management in the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area

“…Despite the numerous frameworks proposed in the literature, data collection challenges and possible other factors have limited the number of analytical studies (to the best of our knowledge: Gabbay de Souza et al., 2016 , Zijp et al., 2017 , Millward-Hopkins et al., 2018 , Di Maria and Sisani, 2019 , Stone et al. 2019 , and Zhou et al., 2019 ). Moreover, for the specific case of household and/or municipal food waste, no such studies are available.…”

Analyzing the economic viability of a large-scale integrated model of municipal solid waste: a study case for the most important Brazilian economic region

“…Some studies are carrying a novel environment-energy-economy-society (3E + S) model from a life cycle perspective for sustainability assessment. As a sample of them, Zhou [17] has shown that incineration was the best choice in his study and landfill with and without energy recovery rank the third and the last position in China.…”

Application of the Operational Research Method to Determine the Optimum Transport Collection Cycle of Municipal Waste in a Predesignated Urban Area

“…The lifecycle and handling of municipal waste are dealt with in other works [30][31][32][33][34][35]. Case studies related to the assessment of the waste management lifecycle are presented in previous studies [32,33,35].…”

“…The lifecycle and handling of municipal waste are dealt with in other works [30][31][32][33][34][35]. Case studies related to the assessment of the waste management lifecycle are presented in previous studies [32,33,35]. For example, one study [32] focuses on the assessment of the sustainability of China's waste management system, while another [33] on the lifecycle of plastics in India, and a third [35] on general municipal solid waste in Iran.…”

“…Case studies related to the assessment of the waste management lifecycle are presented in previous studies [32,33,35]. For example, one study [32] focuses on the assessment of the sustainability of China's waste management system, while another [33] on the lifecycle of plastics in India, and a third [35] on general municipal solid waste in Iran. The problems regarding waste management modelling are dealt with in other studies [7,36,37].…”