Abstract
The circular economy concept offers a number of solutions to increasing amounts of biowaste and resource scarcity by valorising biowaste. However, it is necessary to consistently address the environmental benefits and impacts of circular biowaste management systems (CBWMS). Various decision support tools (DST) for environmental assessment of waste management systems (WMS) exist. This study provides a review of life cycle assessment based WMS-DSTs. Twenty-five WMS-DSTs were identified and analysed through a shortlisting procedure. Eight tools were shortlisted for the assessment of their applicability to deliver sustainability assessment of CBWMS. It was found that six tools model key properties that are necessary for assessing the environmental sustainability of CBWMSs, including waste-specific modelling of gaseous emissions, biogas generation or bioproduct composition. However, only two tools consider both waste-specific heavy metals content in bioproducts and the associated implications when applied on soil. Most of the shortlisted tools are flexible to simulate new technologies involved in CBWMS. Nevertheless, only two tools allow importing directly new background data, which is important when modelling substitution of new bioproducts developed in emerging biowaste refineries.
Highlights
Circular economy has gained attention as a key solution for mitigating the increasing generation of solid waste and resource scarcity
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This study identified and analysed 25 existing waste management systems (WMS)-decision support tools (DST)
Summary
Circular economy has gained attention as a key solution for mitigating the increasing generation of solid waste and resource scarcity. The term “circular economy” is frequently applied to suggest increased sustainability. It tends to focus on an increased quantity of reused and recycled resources and overlook the quality of resource flows re-entering to the product cycle [4]. This can pose a risk of augmenting unwanted recirculation of micro-pollutants [5,6,7,8], if disregarding the material quality, in the transition period from linear to circular systems. Tools designed for agricultural waste streams were excluded, since the focus of this paper is on municipal solid waste
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