Analisi degli impatti ambientali indotti da sistemi di gestione dei rifiuti solidi mediante tecniche di life cycle assessment (LCA)

Abstract

Nowadays, the qualitative and quantitative assessment of environmental impacts produced by every human activity is a topical field of research. As a matter of fact, all over the world there is an increasing attention about the environmental issues and influences exerted by productive and management sectors. In particular, the management of waste is a crucial sector involving important aspects of our life as well as it produces several environmental impacts that have to be adequately monitored and managed in a sustainable development perspective. In the first part, this study was focused on the evaluation of the positive and negative impacts caused on different environmental components by several municipal solid waste management systems defined at provincial scale. This assessment was performed by means of two different Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) procedures called WISARD and SimaPro, respectively. The LCA procedures were able to calculate the consequences produced by the whole system as well as by each phase. While, in the second part, the study was focused on the collection and transport of materials to determine environmental and economic effects for ten municipalities from 1000 to 10,000 inhabitants. The performed analysis taken into account a kerbside collection system of all recyclables, glass excepted, with a percentage of separate collection varying in the range of 35% – 80% and transport to composting of putrescibles, RDF pressed balls production and incineration, final landfilling. There are other two scenarios, for 80% separate collection, that consider different alternatives of treatment for residues as dry residue sorting and final landfilling or direct disposal in landfill. The obtained results pointed out that the increasing of the percentage separated collection involves an environmental performances’ improvement of management system and an environmental benefits’ increase. For high percentage of waste separated collection incineration doesn’t weighed upon impact’s results respectful to dry residue sorting. The results are similar for both Life Cycle Assessment procedures in qualitative terms. xviii With regard phase of collection and transport for communities results show how impacts rise such as community’s size; opposite management costs in term of Euro/inhabitant/year increase for the little communities but don’t depend by the number of inhabitants for the communities with a population major of 5000 inhabitants. The multi-criteria analysis was developed giving the same importance to both economic and environmental variables. The principal result obtained was that the municipalities up to 4000 inhabitants must get together to optimize both environmental and management costs. [edited by author]