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Recently, the European Commission has adopted a Circular Economy package. In addition, climate change is regarded as a major global challenge, and the de-carbonization of the energy sector requires a massive transformation that involves an increase of renewable shares in the energy mix and the incorporation of carbon capture and storage (CCS) processes. Given all this strong new momentum, what will the Norwegian waste-to-energy (WtE) look like in a decade? What threats and opportunities are foreseen? In an attempt to answer these questions, this study combines process-based life-cycle assessment with analysis of the overall energy and material balances, mathematical optimization and cost assessment in four scenarios: (1) the current situation of the Norwegian WtE sector, (2) the implications of the circular economy, (3) the addition of CCS on the current WtE system and (4) a landfill scenario. Except for climate change, the CCS scenario performs worse than the WtE scenario. The energy recovering scenarios perform better than the recycling scenario for (1) freshwater eutrophication and human toxicity potentials due to secondary waste streams and (2) ozone depletion potential due to the additional fossil fuel used in the recycling processes. The inclusion of the near-term climate forcers decreases the climate change impacts by 1% to 13% due to a net cooling mainly induced by NOx. Circular economy may actually give the WtE system the opportunity to strengthen and expand its role towards new or little developed value chains such as secondary raw materials production and valorization of new waste streams occurring in material recycling. Keywords 1. Waste-to-Energy (WtE) 2. Life-cycle assessment (LCA) 3. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) 4. Circular economy 5. Climate change 6. Near-term climate forcers

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Climate impacts of forest bioenergy result from a multitude of warming and cooling effects and vary by location and technology. While past bioenergy studies have analysed a limited number of climate-altering pollutants and activities, no studies have jointly addressed supply chain greenhouse gas emissions, biogenic CO2 fluxes, aerosols and albedo changes at high spatial and process detail. Here, we present a national-level climate impact analysis of stationary bioenergy systems in Norway based on wood-burning stoves and wood biomass-based district heating. We find that cooling aerosols and albedo offset 60–70% of total warming, leaving a net warming of 340 or 69 kg CO2e MWh−1 for stoves or district heating, respectively. Large variations are observed over locations for albedo, and over technology alternatives for aerosols. By demonstrating both notable magnitudes and complexities of different climate warming and cooling effects of forest bioenergy in Norway, our study emphasizes the need to consider multiple forcing agents in climate impact analysis of forest bioenergy.