Assessing the transition of municipal solid waste management using combined material flow analysis and life cycle assessment

Faced with the challenges to deal with increasingly growing and ever diversified municipal solid waste (MSW), a series of waste directives have been published by European Commission to divert MSW from landfills to more sustainable management options. The presented study assessed the transition of MSW man-agement in Nottingham, UK, since the enforcement of the EU Landfill Directive using a tool of combined materials flow analysis (MFA) and life cycle assess-ment (LCA). The results show that the MSW management system in Nottingham changed from a relatively simple landfill & energy from waste (EfW) mode to a complex, multi-technology mode. Improvements in waste reduction, material re-cycling, energy recovery, and landfill prevention have been made. As a positive result, the global warming potential (GWP) of the MSW management system re-duced from 1,076.0 kg CO2–eq./t of MSW in 2001/02 to 211.3 kg CO2–eq./t of MSW in 2016/17. Based on the results of MFA and LCA, recommendations on separating food waste and textile at source and updating treatment technologies are made for future improvement