Waste Reduction, Recycling and Climate Change

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Waste Reduction, Recycling and Climate Change

• The use of the Life Cycle Analysis tool WRATE
• Dr Peter Olsen
• Scottish Environment Protection Agency
• UCCCfS Climate Change Action Plans Planning
  Implementation
• Dundee College
• Dundee 11th May 2009

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Life Cycle Assessment

• Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a methodology for
  assessing the potential environmental impacts of
  a product or service across its entire life
  cycle, or cradle to grave

Its
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Life Cycle Assessment
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LCA

• Using LCA has many advantages
• Often its an eye opener, providing an insight
  into systems and their alternatives
• It can confirm expected environmental impacts and
  reveal completely unexpected impact

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LCA

• However, the results of LCA should not be used in
  isolation to decide on one option over another
• LCA is one of many decision-support tools.

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LCA

• It is also necessary to consider economic and
  social factors, as well as those environmental
  factors that cannot be quantified using LCA

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WRATE

• The software SEPA use to undertake the LCA of
  waste management options is called WRATE (Waste
  and Resource Assessment Tool for the
  Environment). WRATE was developed for the
  Environment Agency to replace the tool used to
  assess the Area Waste Plans when they were first
  developed, WISARD

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WRATE

• LCA of waste management systems is different from
  a product LCA, in that the cradle-to-grave
  approach is applied only to the waste management
  infrastructure.

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WRATE
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WRATE

• Wrate does not include the life cycle of the
  products that are now being treated as waste,
  they are only included in the system once they
  become waste

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WRATE

• Designed to model household waste but can be
  adapted for single waste streams.

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WRATE

• WRATE models
• Non renewable resource Depletion
• Freshwater Ecotoxicity
• Acidification
• Eutrophication
• Global warming
• Human toxicity
• Land use

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WRATE

• When a waste management process generates a
  useable output, such as recycling or energy from
  waste, there are environmental impacts from the
  treatment of those materials, emissions etc.
• There is also avoided impacts, i.e. where the
  requirement for the production of energy from
  more conventional sources is avoided.
• This is accounted for by subtracting impacts of
  e.g. generating energy from waste from the impact
  of generating energy from coal or gas

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WRATE

• A key aspect of interpreting the results from
  WRATE is to understand the concept of avoided
  impacts
• negative numbers mean that the burden of waste
  management system is effectively avoided

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Typical WRATE analysis of different waste
management options
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Scenario comparisons

• A College collects the following
• 100 tonnes of paper
• 1000 tonnes of food waste
• 100 tonnes of drink cans
• 500 tonnes of glass
• 100 tonnes of plastic

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Which treatment will have the biggest impact in
terms of global warming

• Landfill it all ?
• Burn it all in an energy from waste plant?
• Recycle it all?

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All to landfill
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All to Energy from Waste
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Full recycling
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Equivalencies

• WRAT can report impacts in two ways
• CO2 equivalents
• This takes into account the Global Warming impact
  of different elements and display them as kgs of
  Carbon Dioxide
• EUr person equivalents
• converts the impact to the amount of CO2 an
  average European person would emit

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Global Warming Potential
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Where are the burdens?
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Where are the burdens?

• Landfill, collection, treatment and
  transportation have direct impacts whereas
  recycling sees the biggest avoided impact

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Where are the burdens in the landfill?
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Landfill burdens

• around 250 tonnes CO2 eq, is associated with
  construction and operation of the landfill

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Where are the burdens in the landfill collection?

• 202 tonnes from the production of large skips

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Where are the avoided burdens in Recycling?
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Aluminium
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Aluminium

• Almost 800 tonnes of fossil CO2 (or 62 Eur.
  Persons) is avoided by recycling 75 tonnes of
  aluminium

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Waste Reduction, Recycling and Climate Change

• The use of the Life Cycle Analysis tool WRATE
• Dr Peter Olsen
• Scottish Environment Protection Agency
• UCCCfS Climate Change Action Plans Planning
  Implementation
• Dundee College
• Dundee 11th May 2009