Economic, social and environmental sustainability assessment of manure processing in the Netherlands

It is evident that the Dutch livestock industry is characterized as intensive and highly productive. This has contributed substantially to the Dutch economy. Highly intensive livestock industry is naturally accompanied by a large volume of livestock manure which posed negative impacts on the environment as there is no sufficient land to apply all the manure as a fertilizer. This forced farmers to change their ways of manure disposal and to find other ways of creating value from manure. One way to do that is to process the manure by using anaerobic digestion technology to produce energy or to dry the manure so as to transport it to other locations at a lower cost. Despite increased interest in these technologies, their adoption is not successful in the Netherlands and little is known about their sustainability. This thesis assesses the sustainability of manure processing technologies and develops a decision-making tool to assist decision makers in designing sustainable manure management systems in the Netherland