Ceraso, Annachiara (2025) A Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment method for municipal solid waste management systems. [Tesi di dottorato]

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Abstract

Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) includes household waste and waste similar in quality, but generated by non-domestic sources. Its improper disposal can determine severe impacts on ecosystems and on the health of the individuals that come directly or indirectly in contact with it. Therefore, the appropriate management of MSW represents a pressing global issue. Indeed, since the nineteenth century, demographic growth and urbanisation have led to an increasing consumption of resources and production of MSW, due to the growing diffusion of the Linear Economy (LE), or use-and-discard, model. To contrast it, several national and international policies have attempted to propose an alternative paradigm: the Circular Economy (CE), in which waste is treated as a resource to be exploited, instead of an unwanted material. Its application to the productive and waste management sectors of modern society represents one of the most urgent and important challenges at a global level. The integration of circular technologies into MSW management systems (MSWMSs) is essential not only to limit damage to the environment and society, but also to produce marketable goods from waste products, resulting in further economic benefits, therefore managing MSW in a completely sustainable way, with environmental, social, and economic benefits. To achieve the goal of circular waste management, reliable, robust, and scientifically based tools are needed to assess the holistic sustainability of technologies and approaches to be applied to the different phases of MSWMSs (i.e., collection, transport, recycling and energy recovery treatments and the final disposal of the waste itself). In this perspective, Life Cycle Thinking (LCT) represent a valid option, with powerful tools as environmental life cycle assessment (eLCA), life cycle costing (LCC), and social life cycle assessment (S-LCA). Nonetheless, these remain fragmented, each addressing only a single pillar of sustainability. To date, no unified methodology has gained large recognition for simultaneously evaluating all three pillars and incorporating circularity aspects, but the Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment (LCSA) represents the most promising methodology for this purpose as it is meant to assess the environmental, economic and social burdens of products or systems. However, its potential for implementation to MSWMSs has only been partially explored and still suffers from methodological gaps, including the risk of double-counting, inconsistent stakeholder perspectives, lack of suitable indicators, and insufficient consideration of circularity. Therefore, the present doctoral thesis addressed these challenges through the development of a novel LCSA method specifically tailored for MSWMSs and the definition of guidelines for the design of a dedicated supporting database. Hence, the method established a comprehensive set of midpoint and endpoint impact categories and introduced a Composite Sustainability Index (CSI) to integrate environmental, economic, social, and circular impacts into a single, comparable indicator. To explicitly capture the circularity of MSWMSs, new categories were proposed, quantifying the consequences of failing to implement CE strategies or of low acceptance of secondary products: lost resources, lost energy, lost revenues, and rejection of recovered goods. To evaluate the viability of the elaborated method, this was implemented for the sustainability assessment of a recently patented process for the recovery of metals from lithium-ion batteries (LIBs). Although outside the scope of MSW, this case study demonstrated the method’s adaptability to other solid waste streams. The analysis was conducted ex-ante, proving the usefulness of the method for the eco-design of MSWMSs, and for the identification of sustainability and circular hotspots. However, the implementation of the method required the conduction of three separated analyses, each focusing on a different pillar of sustainability, with the support of a considerable amount of data sources. Indeed, current practice requires specialists to conduct separate analyses with disparate and incomplete datasets, resulting in inefficiency and inconsistency. Therefore, the present doctoral work also defined the guidelines to develop a holistic database, to overcome these limitations by integrating environmental, economic, and social indicators within a unified structure modelled on Ecoinvent and PSILCA, enriched with additional circularity-related categories and the incorporation of geospatial data through GIS, to improve the assessment of location-specific impacts such as disamenities costs. Overall, this doctoral research delivered a scientifically grounded, versatile, and practical framework for assessing and enhancing the sustainability and circularity of WMSs. By enabling the identification of hotspots, supporting ex-ante eco-design, and providing an integrative decision-support tool for policymakers and stakeholders, the developed LCSA method represents an essential step toward operationalising CE in WMSs. It demonstrated how the transition to sustainable waste management can be objectively measured, guided, and improved, thereby advancing environmental protection, economic efficiency, and social responsibility in line with global sustainability goals.

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