Model development of sustainability assessment from a life cycle perspective: A case study on waste management systems in China

Abstract

Due to the problems of municipal solid waste (MSW) during the expanding urbanization, strategy to find an environmentally friendly, energy efficient, cost-effective, and socially acceptable MSW management system is essential for sustainable development. This study establishes a novel environment-energy-economy-society (3E + S) model from a life cycle perspective for sustainability assessment: life cycle assessment for evaluating environmental performance and energy consumption, life cycle costing for recording economic burden, and social life cycle assessment for reflecting social impacts; based on the individual 3E + S results, the final ranking of alternatives is obtained by multi-criteria decision making, which is integrated with analytic hierarchy process and entropy weight method. This model is implemented to identify a sustainable MSW management system among four typical treatment alternatives. Results show that incineration with fluidized bed furnace is the best choice in this study; incineration with moving grate furnace follows after with a slight gap; landfill with and without energy recovery rank the third and the last. The framework of SLCA on MSW field is built in this study and sensitivity analysis is provided for further discussion on social impacts. The calculation method of weight factors reduces man-made disturbances and the sensitivity analysis demonstrates strong robustness of the results and effectiveness of the modification for the model.