For me, the most challenging issues in LCA of waste management are the multifuncionality of outputs (like compost for organic waste) and also the complex nature of sub-systems (agriculture, energy, etc), which rarely can be fully considered in LCAs and are commonly limited to some impact categories . Besides that, a challenging issue is the intrinsic technical and intensive data-demanding nature of LCA, which are difficult to equalize to institutional aspects of waste management (specially in developing countries for MSW) and other dimensions of integrated waste management to effectively influence decision making.

My lame idea is:

It sounds like an oxymoron. Waste management and resource management is a part of life-cycles of plenty of products while LCA focuses on the entire (or a part) of a life-cycle of a single product.

A key element of the LCA, namely the unit of operation is missing from the analysis (e.g. mass of goods transported in a plastic bag or faces shaved by a blade) since all products have a different unit of operation.

I believe 'Allocation' could be one of the challenging methodological issue in waste as well as resource management. For Ex - 1) Open-loop recycling allocation: besides taking care of a certain amount of solid waste, many treatment processes also provide additional functions, e.g. energy or materials which are recycled into other products. Two important questions which arise are- whether an allocation between the different functions should be made (and if so how), or if system boundaries should be expanded to include several functions. 2) Multi-input allocation: in waste treatment processes, different materials and products are usually mixed. In many applications there is a need to allocate environmental interventions from the treatment processes to the different input materials. The question is how this should be done.

While recent methodological development and clarity from ISO on the "Need" for allocation has helped, the allocation issue is still challenging and subjective.

Following paper would be of help:

Article Methodological aspects of life cycle assessment of integrate...

For me, the most challenging issues in LCA of waste management are the multifuncionality of outputs (like compost for organic waste) and also the complex nature of sub-systems (agriculture, energy, etc), which rarely can be fully considered in LCAs and are commonly limited to some impact categories . Besides that, a challenging issue is the intrinsic technical and intensive data-demanding nature of LCA, which are difficult to equalize to institutional aspects of waste management (specially in developing countries for MSW) and other dimensions of integrated waste management to effectively influence decision making.

In my opinion, I think the most challenging issue is how to compare the impacts of different pollution in the waste management by carbon footprint or others, such as the groundwater pollution, the air pollution, the land occupation, the noise, the sanitary, the landscape destruction and so on.

All good points introduced so far, especially by Zhiyong, but another big challenge is the reliability of assumptions we make around the performance of specific categories of waste processing technologies. For example, we may have performance data from 3 leading providers of wet AD plants. Their performance figures are different, they may not necessarily be based on rigorous comparative measurement and their average may not represent the true average of the range of wet AD technologies available in the market place. We can never have full perfect data, but average data are being used in important strategic decisions around investment in waste management systems, possibly without appreciation of the inherent uncertainties.

I am not an expert on waste and resource management LCA, however I believe the inclusion of time considerations might also be an important methodological aspect (e.g. assumptions on decay rates and carbon sequestration). This could help understanding the impacts of current landfills that have yet to be released, or the long-term impacts of waste management practices. You might already be familiar with the literature, but here are two papers I recently read that could be relevant:

Article A Systematic Exploration of Efficient Strategies to Manage S...

Article Proving the climate benefit in the production of biofuels fr...

In my opinion, LCA of waste is use for identifying the potential environmental impact of products through out its life cycle. This will help for comparison of products in there life including use of resources, marketing, impact on environment for managing and decision making.

Remote areas

Hi Ola,

In LCA I think it is easy to draw system boundary where it suits you and it is so easy to get the analysis to suit your bias.

I have been engaged on the CVORR project at Leeds University - can I suggest that you look at this method https://cvorr.leeds.ac.uk/ they have case studies and have a methodology which should help you, the three open access papers attached will give you a flavour of this method.

Also take a look at the simple overall item of a manufacturing system and it's interactions.

A presentation by Costas, one of the co-coordinating academics, will give you some thoughts on how the two processes are different.

Let me know what you think.

Andrew