LAR(5) Laboratory - Dipartimento di Ingegneria, University of Perugia, via G. Duranti 93, 06125 Perugia, Italy.
ENEA, National Agency for New technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development, Laboratory of Health and Environment, Rome, Italy.
Sci Total Environ. 2021 Jul 1;776:145785. doi: 10.1016/j.scitotenv.2021.145785. Epub 2021 Feb 19.
The impact of municipal solid waste incineration (MSWI) on the environment and on human health was assessed by a life cycle assessment (LCA) approach. Even if risk assessment and epidemiologic analyses are specifically indicated for the investigation of the health outcomes, they resulted costly, time intensive and generally focused only on the effects caused by pollutant compounds directly emitted by the facility. Differently, LCA approaches are less time and cost intensive and able to account also for other indirect and direct emission of MSWI. However, results returned by LCA are based on average pollutant diffusion and individual exposure models limiting their representativeness for the specific context investigated. Furthermore, LCA is not able to return information about the final health outcomes caused by the pollutants emitted. The LCA performed for the Italian MSWI detected avoided impacts of about -0.11 kgPM/tonne of MSW and of about -2.5 × 10 kgSb/tonne MSW for particulate matters and resource depletion, respectively. Positive impacts of about 900 kgCO/tonne MSW and about 15,000 CTUe/tonne MSW were detected for global warming and freshwater ecotoxicity indicators, respectively. Avoided impacts of about -1 × 10 CTUh/tonne MSW and of about -2 × 10 DALY/tonne MSW were also detected for human toxicity cancer and human health indicators, respectively. Epidemiologic studies referred to different Italian and EU reported some correlations among MSWI and some specific cancer and non-cancer health outcomes. By the way, these resulted affected by some methodological limitation preventing the definitive identification of causal nexus. In any case, a general coherence between LCA and epidemiologic approaches was detected. Furthermore, a particular correspondence was found between LCA results and biomonitoring studies concerning the concentration of heavy metals in blood and urinary samples of exposed individuals. All this highlighted the important role that LCA can have in supporting health impact assessment of MSWI in combination with epidemiologic approaches.
采用生命周期评价 (LCA) 方法评估了城市固体废物焚烧 (MSWI) 对环境和人类健康的影响。尽管风险评估和流行病学分析专门用于调查健康结果，但它们成本高昂、耗时且通常仅关注设施直接排放的污染物化合物引起的影响。相比之下，LCA 方法的时间和成本效率更高，并且还能够考虑 MSWI 的其他间接和直接排放。然而，LCA 产生的结果基于污染物扩散的平均值和个体暴露模型，限制了它们对所研究特定情况的代表性。此外，LCA 无法提供有关污染物排放引起的最终健康结果的信息。对意大利 MSWI 进行的 LCA 检测到，在颗粒物和资源枯竭方面，分别避免了约 -0.11 公斤/吨 MSW 和 -2.5×10 公斤 Sb/吨 MSW 的影响。在全球变暖淡水生态毒性指标方面，分别检测到约 900 公斤/吨 MSW 和约 15000 CTUe/吨 MSW 的正面影响。在人类毒性癌症和人类健康指标方面，分别检测到避免约 -1×10 CTUh/吨 MSW 和 -2×10 DALY/吨 MSW 的影响。流行病学研究涉及到意大利和欧盟的不同报告，发现了 MSWI 与一些特定癌症和非癌症健康结果之间的一些相关性。顺便说一句，这些结果受到一些方法学限制的影响，这些限制阻止了因果关系的最终确定。在任何情况下，都检测到了 LCA 和流行病学方法之间的一般一致性。此外，还发现了 LCA 结果与生物监测研究之间的特殊对应关系，这些研究涉及暴露个体血液和尿液样本中重金属的浓度。所有这些都强调了 LCA 在与流行病学方法结合使用时在支持 MSWI 健康影响评估方面可以发挥的重要作用。
