Life Cycle Assessment of organic waste management strategies: an Italian case study
Author(s)
Date Issued
2015
Type
article
Volume
89
Issue
89
Start Page
125
End Page
136
ISSN
9596526
Journal
Abstract
The aim of the paper was to evaluate the environmental burden of the organic waste management systems implemented in Umbria region in Italy, in order to provide useful information for taking strategic decisions aimed at the improvement and optimization. The two most widespread scenarios were analyzed: source-segregated collection followed by organic fertilizer production and not-differentiated collection followed by mechanical and biological treatment and disposal in landfill of the biostabilized material. The environmental performance was assessed through Life Cycle Assessment methodology, assuming one ton of organic waste as functional unit. Most of data for life cycle inventory were provided by actual facilities while background data were obtained from EcoInvent database. The alternative scenarios were compared through the IMPACT 2002+ method and the assessment was carried out on both midpoint and endpoint levels. Results showed that the landfilling of the undifferentiated organic waste has the least impact on the analyzed impact categories, except on the Global Warming, mostly due to the uncollected methane released by the landfill. As regards the aerobic composting of the source-segregated organic fraction, the efforts to reduce the impact should be mainly focused on the reduction of the air emissions (hydrogen sulfide, particulate, ammonia and NMVOC) from the biostabilization process. Furthermore the sensitivity analysis indicated that the increase of the biogas collection efficiency could significantly improve the performance of the not-differentiated collection scenario. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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Name
LCA organic waste.pdf
Description
Manuscript
Size
1.51 MB
Format
Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
ee61bebf0d7c18bdd0546d97d4971f74
Conference(s)
JOURNAL OF CLEANER PRODUCTION