Application of Environmental Sustainability Assessment Methodologies to Waste Management Systems and to Energy and Material Recovery Processes

During the PhD program in chemistry, curriculum in environmental chemistry, at the University of Bologna the sustainability of waste management systems and of energy and material recovery processes was investigated through the application of the LCA (Life Cyle Assesment) methodology, which allows a systematic approach that supports the detection of environmental-oriented strategies to obtain industrial improvements. The study is intended to help analyses aimed at understanding the global effects of the waste management sector and the efforts were focused on the integrated waste management system and on systems of recovery of energy and materials in order to investigate the best way to manage waste taking into account the technologies available on the market and the features of each situation at local scale, evaluating their sustainability in comparison with traditional systems, from a life cycle perspective. The environmental benefits associated with changes and improvements of the adopted solutions were assessed through a global approach. Results emerged from the analysis confirms that the sustainability in the waste management sector should be evaluated considering all the stages and flows involved in each system in order to avoid the shifting of the environmental burdens from a step to another. Only a deeper knowledge may help to address successfully the challenge towards a transition to a more sustainable use of resources and to guide future national industrial policy toward a low-carbon economy. In the future, LCA analysis should be increasingly supported even by other tools able to investigate the other two dimension of sustainability, represented by the social and the economic spheres.