title: Review of LCA studies of solid waste management systems--part I: lessons learned and perspectives.
abstract: The continuously increasing solid waste generation worldwide calls for management strategies that integrate concerns for environmental sustainability. By quantifying environmental impacts of systems, life cycle assessment (LCA) is a tool, which can contribute to answer that call. But how, where and to which extent has it been applied to solid waste management systems (SWMSs) until now, and which lessons can be learnt from the findings of these LCA applications? To address these questions, we performed a critical review of 222 published LCA studies of SWMS. We first analysed the geographic distribution and found that the published studies have primarily been concentrated in Europe with little application in developing countries. In terms of technological coverage, they have largely overlooked application of LCA to waste prevention activities and to relevant waste types apart from household waste, e.g. construction and demolition waste. Waste management practitioners are thus encouraged to abridge these gaps in future applications of LCA. In addition to this contextual analysis, we also evaluated the findings of selected studies of good quality and found that there is little agreement in the conclusions among them. The strong dependence of each SWMS on local conditions, such as waste composition or energy system, prevents a meaningful generalisation of the LCA results as we find it in the waste hierarchy. We therefore recommend stakeholders in solid waste management to regard LCA as a tool, which, by its ability of capturing the local specific conditions in the modelling of environmental impacts and benefits of a SWMS, allows identifying critical problems and proposing improvement options adapted to the local specificities.
authors.affiliation: Division for Quantitative Sustainability Assessment, Department of Management Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, 2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark. Electronic address: alau@dtu.dk.
authors.forename: Alexis
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Laurent
authors.affiliation: Division for Quantitative Sustainability Assessment, Department of Management Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, 2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark.
authors.forename: Ioannis
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Bakas
authors.affiliation: Residual Resources Engineering, Department of Environmental Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, 2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark.
authors.forename: Julie
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Clavreul
authors.affiliation: Water and Environmental Engineering, Department of Chemical Engineering, Lund University, 221 00 Lund, Sweden.
authors.forename: Anna
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Bernstad
authors.affiliation: Division for Quantitative Sustainability Assessment, Department of Management Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, 2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark; ECO - Ecosystems and Environmental Sustainability, Department of Chemical and Biochemical Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, 4000 Roskilde, Denmark.
authors.forename: Monia
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Niero
authors.affiliation: Copenhagen Resource Institute, 1215 Copenhagen K, Denmark.
authors.forename: Emmanuel
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Gentil
authors.affiliation: Division for Quantitative Sustainability Assessment, Department of Management Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, 2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark.
authors.forename: Michael Z
authors.initials: MZ
authors.lastname: Hauschild
authors.affiliation: Residual Resources Engineering, Department of Environmental Engineering, Technical University of Denmark, 2800 Kgs. Lyngby, Denmark.
authors.forename: Thomas H
authors.initials: TH
authors.lastname: Christensen
mesh_terms: D005060:Europe; D012037:Refuse Disposal / Q000592:standards; D018505:Waste Management / Q000592:standards*
keywords: Contextual analysis; Decision- and policy-making; Life cycle assessment; Mapping; Result interpretation; Waste hierarchy