Journal
WASTE MANAGEMENT & RESEARCH
Volume 36, Issue 1, Pages 3-16Publisher
SAGE PUBLICATIONS LTD
DOI: 10.1177/0734242X17730137
Keywords
Waste-to-energy; life cycle assessment; exergetic life cycle assessment; life cycle costing; social life cycle assessment; environment-energy-economy
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Funding
- National Natural Science Foundation of China [51276168]
- Program of Introducing Talents of Discipline to University [B08026]
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This article proposes a comprehensive review of evaluation tools based on life cycle thinking, as applied to waste-to-energy. Habitually, life cycle assessment is adopted to assess environmental burdens associated with waste-to-energy initiatives. Based on this framework, several extension methods have been developed to focus on specific aspects: Exergetic life cycle assessment for reducing resource depletion, life cycle costing for evaluating its economic burden, and social life cycle assessment for recording its social impacts. Additionally, the environment-energy-economy model integrates both life cycle assessment and life cycle costing methods and judges simultaneously these three features for sustainable waste-to-energy conversion. Life cycle assessment is sufficiently developed on waste-to-energy with concrete data inventory and sensitivity analysis, although the data and model uncertainty are unavoidable. Compared with life cycle assessment, only a few evaluations are conducted to waste-to-energy techniques by using extension methods and its methodology and application need to be further developed. Finally, this article succinctly summarises some recommendations for further research.
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