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No abstract

Prevention has been suggested as the preferred food waste management solution compared to alternatives such as conversion to animal fodder or to energy. In this study we used societal life-cycle costing, as a welfare economic assessment, and environmental life-cycle costing, as a financial assessment combined with life-cycle assessment, to evaluate food waste management. Both life-cycle costing assessments included direct and indirect effects. The latter are related to income effects, accounting for the marginal consumption induced when alternative scenarios lead to different household expenses, and the land-use-changes effect, associated with food production. The results highlighted that prevention, while providing the highest welfare gains as more services/goods could be consumed with the same income, could also incur the highest environmental impacts if the monetary savings from unpurchased food commodities were spent on goods/services with a more environmentally damaging production than that of the (prevented) food. This was not the case when savings were used, e.g., for health care, education, and insurances. This study demonstrates that income effects, although uncertain, should be included whenever alternative scenarios incur different financial costs. Furthermore, it highlights that food prevention measures should not only demote the purchase of unconsumed food but also promote a low-impact use of the savings generated.

The development of sustainable solid waste management (SWM) systems requires consideration of both economic and environmental impacts. Societal life-cycle costing (S-LCC) provides a quantitative framework to estimate both economic and environmental impacts, by including "budget costs" and "externality costs". Budget costs include market goods and services (economic impact), whereas externality costs include effects outside the economic system (e.g., environmental impact). This study demonstrates the applicability of S-LCC to SWM life-cycle optimization through a case study based on an average suburban U.S. county of 500 000 people generating 320 000 Mg of waste annually. Estimated externality costs are based on emissions of CO, CH, NO, PM, PM, NO, SO, VOC, CO, NH, Hg, Pb, Cd, Cr (VI), Ni, As, and dioxins. The results indicate that incorporating S-LCC into optimized SWM strategy development encourages the use of a mixed waste material recovery facility with residues going to incineration, and separated organics to anaerobic digestion. Results are sensitive to waste composition, energy mix and recycling rates. Most of the externality costs stem from SO, NO, PM, CH, fossil CO, and NH emissions. S-LCC proved to be a valuable tool for policy analysis, but additional data on key externality costs such as organic compounds emissions to water would improve future analyses.

Waste refineries focusing on multiple outputs of material resources, energy carriers, and nutrients may potentially provide more sustainable utilization of waste resources than traditional waste technologies. This consequential life cycle assessment (LCA) evaluated the environmental performance of a Danish waste refinery solution against state-of-the-art waste technology alternatives (incineration, mechanical-biological treatment (MBT), and landfilling). In total 252 scenarios were evaluated, including effects from source-segregation, waste composition, and energy conversion pathway efficiencies. Overall, the waste refinery provided global warming (GW) savings comparable with efficient incineration, MBT, and bioreactor landfilling technologies. The main environmental benefits from waste refining were a potential for improved phosphorous recovery (about 85%) and increased electricity production (by 15-40% compared with incineration); albeit at the potential expense of additional toxic emissions to soil.Society's need for the outputs from waste, i.e. energy products (electricity vs. transport fuels) and resources (e.g., phosphorous), and the available waste composition were found decisive for the selection of future technologies. Based on the results, it is recommended that a narrow focus on GW aspects should be avoided as most waste technologies may allow comparable performance.Rather, other environmental aspects such as resource recovery and toxic emissions should receive attention in the future.3