Advancing towards circular economy: Environmental benefits of an innovative biorefinery for municipal solid waste management

Abstract

Inadequate municipal solid waste (MSW) disposal represents a current global challenge, contributing to environmental and societal issues. Instead of viewing waste as a problem, an alternative would be integrate it back into the production chain through a circular economic perspective. In response, an innovative and integrated biorefinery (2IB) has been implemented to effectively manage MSW, without the need for pre-treatment or source separation. This paper aims to evaluate the environmental performance of the 2IB using the life cycle assessment (LCA) method, comparing the results with a MSW landfilling alternative. The ReCiPe-LCA method is applied, and nine impact categories are calculated. Focusing on net emissions, the results show that 2IB yields higher environmental benefits than sanitary landfill in eight out of nine impact categories. For each 1 tonne of MSW treated, the 2IB causes from 2.6 to up to 8.9 times lower global warming, fossil depletion, photochemical oxidant formation, and freshwater eutrophication, 18.9 times lower metal depletion, 22.3 times lower human toxicity, 42.5 times lower terrestrial acidification, and 161 times lower particular matter formation. However, the sanitary landfill leads to two times lower water depletion compared to the 2IB. These findings advocate for prioritizing the 2IB over the sanitary landfill in propositions for public policies focused on MSW management. This work contributes by providing technical information on the 2IB that can be evaluated under methods other than LCA, besides showing its environmental advantages that would boost better decisions towards MSW disposal from a circular economy perspective.