Plastic impurities in biowaste treatment: environmental and economic life cycle assessment of a composting plant.

The study focuses on an Italian composting plant and aims to investigate the impact of the presence of plastic impurities in the collected biowaste on the environmental and economic performance of the plant. The study is divided into two main steps: firstly, a material flow analysis was conducted to quantify the number of impurities (e.g.

A field-capable rapid plant DNA extraction protocol using microneedle patches for botanical surveying and monitoring.

Premise: A novel protocol for rapid plant DNA extraction using microneedles is proposed, which supports botanic surveys, taxonomy, and systematics. This protocol can be conducted in the field with limited laboratory skills and equipment. The protocol is validated by sequencing and comparing the results with QIAGEN spin-column DNA extractions using BLAST analyses.

Door-to-door waste collection: A framework for the socio - Economic evaluation and ergonomics optimisation.

Waste collection is the first step of waste management, and its characteristics impact workers' health and safety. Arising out of the challenge for waste collection operators to design sustainable systems of work, the authors review the literature on ergonomics and socio-economic sustainability and design a theoretical framework for assessing the sustainability of waste collection. The framework quantitatively assess the impact of the door-to-door collection system on the health and safety of the workers to provide indications to waste collection operators on how the load carried by workers can be minimised and the economic and social sustainability can be improved.

Assessing the externalities of a waste management system via life cycle costing: The case study of the Emilia-Romagna Region (Italy).

Effective and efficient urban waste management systems (WMSs) are a cornerstone for a sustainable society. Life cycle costing (LCC) provides a useful framework for the joint analysis of economic and environmental impacts of a WMS, by considering both financial and external costs. The present study applies the methodology of societal LCC to the WMS of the Italian region of Emilia-Romagna to provide a case study on how the available information on waste flows and budget costs of a real WMS can be used to obtain an estimate of the total cost of waste management, including externalities.

Municipal solid waste collection systems: An indicator to assess the reusability of products.

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From hazardous asbestos containing wastes (ACW) to new secondary raw material through a new sustainable inertization process: A multimethodological mineralogical study.

Nowadays, asbestos-containing wastes (ACW) still represent an important environmental problem and a severe health hazard due to the well known pulmonary diseases derived from asbestos fibers inhalation. Except for a very few cases, ACW are currently confined in controlled landfills, giving rise to increasingly high amounts of still hazardous wastes. A promising alternative to landfill confinement is represented by ACW inertization, but the high cost of the inertization processes so far proposed by the scientific community have hampered the creation of actually operative plants.

A framework for sustainability assessment and prioritisation of urban waste prevention measures.

Waste prevention (WP) can play a significant role in pursuing both sustainable development and decarbonization. Nevertheless, a general method to monitor and evaluate WP does not exist yet. This study proposes a framework for the sustainability assessment and prioritisation of waste prevention measures (WPMs), at consumption level.