Life Cycle Assessment of organic waste management strategies: an Italian case study

The aim of the paper was to evaluate the environmental burden of the organic waste management systems implemented in Umbria region in Italy, in order to provide useful information for taking strategic decisions aimed at the improvement and optimization. The two most widespread scenarios were analyzed: source-segregated collection followed by organic fertilizer production and not-differentiated collection followed by mechanical and biological treatment and disposal in landfill of the biostabilized material. The environmental performance was assessed through Life Cycle Assessment methodology, assuming one ton of organic waste as functional unit. Most of data for life cycle inventory were provided by actual facilities while background data were obtained from Ecolnvent database. The alternative scenarios were compared through the IMPACT 2002+ method and the assessment was carried out on both midpoint and endpoint levels. Results showed that the landfilling of the undifferentiated organic waste has the least impact on the analyzed impact categories, except on the Global Warming, mostly due to the uncollected methane released by the landfill. As regards the aerobic composting of the source-segregated organic fraction, the efforts to reduce the impact should be mainly focused on the reduction of the air emissions (hydrogen sulfide, particulate, ammonia and NMVOC) from the biostabilization process. Furthermore the sensitivity analysis indicated that the increase of the biogas collection efficiency could significantly improve the performance of the not-differentiated collection scenario. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.