The current waste management systems are struggling to optimally handle biodegradable plastics (BDPs) and are facing numerous challenges; one of which is the consumer confusion about how to best source-segregate BDPs. Based on an environmental life-cycle assessment, this study investigated the consequences of collecting BDPs in one of three waste streams (packaging waste, biowaste, and residual waste) in Austria. Collecting BDPs as (i) packaging waste resulted in incineration (SP1) or mechanical recycling (SP2), (ii) biowaste resulted in composting (SB1) or anaerobic digestion (AD) (SB2), and (iii) residual waste in incineration (SR1).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiodegradable plastics have certain challenges in a waste management perspective. The existing literature reviews fail to provide a consolidated overview of different process steps of biodegradable plastic waste management and to discuss the support provided by the existing legislation for the same. The present review provides a holistic overview of these process steps and a comprehensive relative summary of 13 existing European Union (EU) laws related to waste management and circular economy, and national legislations plus source separation guidelines of 13 countries, to ensure the optimal use of resources in the future.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProper waste sorting is crucial for biodegradable plastics (BDPs) recycling, whose global production is increasing dynamically. BDPs can be sorted using near-infrared (NIR) sorting, but little research is available about the effect of surface contamination on their NIR spectrum, which affects their sortability. As BDPs are often heavily contaminated with food waste, understanding the effect of surface contamination is necessary.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBiodegradable plastics, either fossil- or biobased, are often promoted due to their biodegradability and acclaimed environmental friendliness. However, as demonstrated by previous literature, considerable confusion exists about the appropriate source separation and waste management of these plastics. Present study investigated this confusion based on manual sorting analyses of waste sampled from packaging waste (), biowaste () and residual waste () in an urban area of Austria.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFood waste prevention across the food supply chain has been addressed by the European Union (EU) as the top priority to reduce farm-to-fork impacts. Despite the environmental benefits of food waste prevention are widely acknowledged, life cycle assessments usually do not account for rebound effects, the inclusion of which may decrease or even cancel out the expected environmental savings. Rebound effects are understood as the re-spending of accrued monetary savings, determined by the implementation of food waste prevention initiatives, either on the same product (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPlastics are a challenge for the circular economy due to their overall low recycling rate and high dependency on primary resources. This study analyzes the EU demand for poly(ethylene terephthalate) (PET) packaging from 2020 to 2030 and quantifies the potential environmental and societal savings by changing the waste management and consumption patterns compared with business-as-usual practices. The results of the life-cycle assessment and life-cycle costing show that a maximum of 38 Mt of CO-eq and 34 kt of PM-eq could be saved with a more efficient waste management system and a robust secondary material market while also avoiding 8.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDue to the global trend of urbanization, the amount of sewage water is increasing in cities. This calls for efficient treatment of the resulting sewage sludge. To date, in the 27 European Union member countries (EU-27), the prevailing treatment method is application on arable land.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFLife cycle assessment (LCA) modelling of resource-related technologies can be challenging in the context of circular economy, bioeconomy, recycling and integrated waste management, where materials are recirculated within processes and undergo chemical-physical transformations. This implies redefinition of physical flows within the LCA model. Additionally, physical flows may have non-linear responses to changes in model parameters and background processes, involve activities such as extraction of materials and chemical substances, and directly affect emissions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study evaluates the potential circularity of PET, PE, and PP flows in Europe based on dynamic material flow analysis (MFA), considering product lifetimes, demand growth rates, and quality reductions of recycled plastic (downcycling). The circularity was evaluated on a baseline scenario, representing 2016 conditions, and on prospective scenarios representing key circularity enhancing initiatives, including (i) maintaining constant plastic consumption, (ii) managing waste plastic exports in the EU, (iii) design-for-recycling initiatives, (iv) improved collection, and (v) improved recovery and reprocessing. Low recycling rates (, 13-20%) and dependence on virgin plastic, representing 85-90% of the annual plastic demand, were demonstrated after 50 years in the baseline.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe use of food waste as feedstock in the manufacture of high-value products is considered a promising avenue for achieving (bio)circular economy goals. The use of residual biomass helps decrease fossil fuel dependency whilst simultaneously reducing the demand for additional biomass resource. Despite the interest in exploiting food waste in high-value product manufacturing, few studies assess the sustainability of such applications.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFCitizens increasingly dispose their waste at household waste recycling centres (HWRC). To enhance the collection of recyclables materials, local authorities and waste management companies invest considerable resources in planning. While the planning of these centres requires a comprehensive understanding of collected solid waste, only limited studies have consistently investigated waste data from HWRC.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe retail sector, generating large amounts of food waste in a limited and well-defined number of locations, represents a unique opportunity for the implementation of waste minimisation policies targeting food waste and surplus food. France has introduced policy measures forcing retailers to prioritise the redistribution of surplus food to charity (donation) and/or diversion to animal feed. To evaluate the environmental benefits from such initiatives, this study provides a bottom-up consequential life cycle assessment of surplus food management at twenty retail outlets in France.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFFood waste, particularly when avoidable, incurs loss of resources and considerable environmental impacts due to the multiple processes involved in the life cycle. This study applies a bottom-up life cycle assessment method to quantify the environmental impacts of the avoidable food waste generated by four sectors of the food supply chain in United Kingdom, namely processing, wholesale and retail, food service, and households. The impacts were quantified for ten environmental impact categories, from Global Warming to Water Depletion, including indirect land use change impacts due to demand for land.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFData for fractional solid waste composition provide relative magnitudes of individual waste fractions, the percentages of which always sum to 100, thereby connecting them intrinsically. Due to this sum constraint, waste composition data represent closed data, and their interpretation and analysis require statistical methods, other than classical statistics that are suitable only for non-constrained data such as absolute values. However, the closed characteristics of waste composition data are often ignored when analysed.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBioenergy is often considered an important component, alongside other renewables, to mitigate global warming and to reduce fossil fuel dependency. Determining sustainable strategies for utilizing biomass resources, however, requires a holistic perspective to reflect a wider range of potential environmental consequences. To circumvent the limitations of scenario-based life cycle assessment (LCA), we develop a multiobjective optimization model to systematically identify the environmentally optimal use of biomass for energy under given system constraints.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFMany nano-enabled consumer products are known to be in the global market. At the same, little is known about the quantity, type, location etc. of the engineered nanomaterials (ENMs) inside the products.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSustainable solutions for reducing food waste require a good understanding of food waste generation and composition, including avoidable and unavoidable food waste. We analysed 12tonnes of residual household waste collected from 1474 households, without source segregation of organic waste. Food waste was divided into six fractions according to avoidability, suitability for home-composting and whether or not it was cooked, prepared or had been served within the household.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPrevention has been suggested as the preferred food waste management solution compared to alternatives such as conversion to animal fodder or to energy. In this study we used societal life-cycle costing, as a welfare economic assessment, and environmental life-cycle costing, as a financial assessment combined with life-cycle assessment, to evaluate food waste management. Both life-cycle costing assessments included direct and indirect effects.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFGreenhouse gas (GHG) emission savings from biofuels dramatically depend upon the source of energy displaced and the effects induced outside the energy sector, for instance land-use changes (LUC). Using consequential life-cycle assessment and including LUC effects, this study provides GHG emission factors (EFs) for bioelectricity, biomethane, and bioethanol produced from twenty-four biomasses (from dedicated crops to residues of different origin) under a fossil and a non-fossil energy system. Accounting for numerous variations in the pathways, a total of 554 GHG EFs were quantified.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFState-of-the-art environmental assessment of waste management systems rely on data for the physico-chemical composition of individual material fractions comprising the waste in question. To derive the necessary inventory data for different scopes and systems, literature data from different sources and backgrounds are consulted and combined. This study provides an overview of physico-chemical waste characterisation data for individual waste material fractions available in literature and thereby aims to support the selection of data fitting to a specific scope and the selection of uncertainty ranges related to the data selection from literature.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFExisting legislation mandates that the amount of waste being recycled should be increased. Among others, in its Resource Strategy Plan, the Danish Government decided that at least 60% of food waste generated by the service sector, including in office areas, should be source-sorted and collected separately by 2018. To assess the achievability of these targets, source-sorted food waste and residual waste from office areas was collected and weighed on a daily basis during 133 working days.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe main characteristics and environmental properties of the bottom ash (BA) generated from thermal treatment of waste may vary significantly depending on the type of waste and thermal technology employed. Thus, to ensure that the strategies selected for the management of these residues do not cause adverse environmental impacts, the specific properties of BA, in particular its leaching behavior, should be taken into account. This study focuses on the evaluation of potential environmental impacts associated with two different management options for BA from thermal treatment of Refuse Derived Fuel (RDF): landfilling and recycling as a filler for road sub bases.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBottom ash, the main solid output from municipal solid waste incineration (MSWI), has significant potential for the recovery of resources such as scrap metals and aggregates. The utilisation of these resources ideally enables natural resources to be saved. However, the quality of the recovered scrap metals may limit recycling potential, and the utilisation of aggregates may cause the release of toxic substances into the natural environment through leaching.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper provides a detailed and comprehensive cost model for the economic assessment of solid waste management systems. The model was based on the principles of Life Cycle Costing (LCC) and followed a bottom-up calculation approach providing detailed cost items for all key technologies within modern waste systems. All technologies were defined per tonne of waste input, and each cost item within a technology was characterised by both a technical and an economic parameter (for example amount and cost of fuel related to waste collection), to ensure transparency, applicability and reproducibility.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF