Improving Life Cycle Assessments for Sustainable Solid Waste Management

Decision Making

Abstract

Wendy developed a state-of-the science life-cycle assessment (LCA) model for a regulatory compliant municipal solid waste landfill in the US. She found that while landfill gas emissions contribute 50–99% to global warming, ozone depletion, and smog impacts, the production of materials required for construction and operation of the landfill contribute 68–75% to toxicity impacts. This is important because many landfill LCAs do not fully consider the materials used in the landfill, and this result shows that their inclusion is critical for understanding toxicity impacts from landfills. This regulatory compliant landfill LCA model has been implemented to investigate the impact of plastics’ biodegradabilities as disposed in landfills on GHG emissions. Additionally, the first comparison of the effects of using dynamic versus static global warming potentials (GWPs) on estimates of the global warming impacts associated with long-term emissions from landfills. It was found that in general using dynamic 100-year GWPs will not change alternative rankings compared to static GWPs. However, that does not hold when using 20-year GWPs, and the dynamic GWPs show the change in radiative forcing over time in a way that static GWPs inherently cannot. Wendy developed methods for reducing the time, costs, and data required to develop meaningful LCAs of solid waste management systems. This streamlining LCA framework helps facilitate the use of LCAs proactively in the early design and planning stages of solid waste strategy development where most of the decisions related to environmental sustainability occur. The streamlined framework proved to reach similar conclusions to full life-cycle assessments while substantially reducing the time and data requirements of conventional LCAs.

Bio:

Wendy is a sustainability expert at Quantis, primarily focusing on developing percare food database, product life cycle assessment at food sector, carbon accounting across supply chain, and food losses and waste management assessment. Wendy is also in joint appointment with NCSU and Argonne where she applies her expertise in life cycle assessment to investigate the sustainability of emerging waste valorization pathways (e.g., developing LCA for waste conversion to sustainable aviation fuels). Before joining Quantis, Wendy received her Ph.D. in Civil Engineering from North Carolina State University in 2021 and did one year of postdoctoral research with the GREET Group at Argonne National Laboratory where she led the development and maintenance of the Waste module currently integrated in GREET.

Zoom Meeting Info:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83318805931?pwd=Y0hMelE3YjQ2SEMyRXYzL2lTdHlXdz09

Meeting ID: 833 1880 5931
Passcode: 568369