ENVIRONMENTAL EVALUATION OF HOUSEHOLD WASTE MANAGEMENT SYSTEM IN SOUTHERN GERMANY

In order to quantify and compare the environmental impacts caused by several

modern household waste management strategies in the federal state of Baden-Württemberg,

Germany, the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) cradle-to-grave analysis, which accounts for the

material and energy flows during the life cycle of a product or service, has been applied. In the

case of household wastes, the environmental impacts through out the waste management chain

correspond to the sum of the impacts that arise during the end-of-life operations of each product

that leaves households as waste. The LCA carried out included the evaluation of the direct

impacts arising from household waste management strategies, as well as the benefits obtained

through the substitution of raw material and primary energy sources. The operations evaluated

include the collection and transportation of wastes, material and energetic recovery, anaerobic

digestion, residual waste treatment and final disposal. For the treatment of residual waste,

incineration, mechanical-biological treatment, and mechanical biological stabilization were

modeled, since they represent the state of the art in the Federal Republic of Germany in terms of

waste treatment technologies.