Institute of Waste Treatment and Reclamation, Tongji University, No. 1239 Siping Road, Shanghai 200092, People's Republic of China; State Key Laboratory of Pollution Control and Source Reuse, Tongji University, 1239 Siping Road, Shanghai 200092, People's Republic of China.
Institute of Waste Treatment and Reclamation, Tongji University, No. 1239 Siping Road, Shanghai 200092, People's Republic of China.
Waste Manag. 2023 Mar 1;158:57-65. doi: 10.1016/j.wasman.2023.01.008. Epub 2023 Jan 12.
Rural solid waste management is essential for fulfilling sustainable development goals, especially in developing countries. However, quantitative study on this aspect has been little and far behind the urban areas. In this study, the environmental impacts of four typical rural solid waste management systems were quantified using life cycle assessment based on data from field investigations of five towns across four seasons. Sensitivity analysis was used to determine the most influential parameters. The results showed that landfilling mixed waste contributed the highest environmental impacts. By substituting landfilling with incineration, the environmental impacts (i.e., global warming potential, terrestrial acidification potential, fossil resource scarcity, freshwater ecotoxicity potential) dropped about 110%-900%. When shifting collection schemes to source separation, the environmental impacts also decreased by approximately 50%-200%. However, the environmental impacts of applying source separation to the existing management systems with mixed collection and disposal facilities of landfill or waste-to-energy (WTE) incineration are unclear and depend on the performance of decentralized composting and anaerobic digestion facilities, which need further investigations. Compared with urban cases, the landfill in rural areas emits higher greenhouse gas (GHG), and WTE incineration plants in rural areas have similar GHG emissions to WTE in urban areas. Besides, energy recovery was the most influential process in WTE systems and a 1% improvement on that would bring over 10% progress on global warming potential impact category. These findings can be useful for improving and developing rural domestic waste treatment in China and other developing countries.
农村固体废物管理对于实现可持续发展目标至关重要，特别是在发展中国家。然而，这方面的定量研究很少，远远落后于城市地区。本研究采用基于五个城镇四季实地调查数据的生命周期评估方法，量化了四种典型的农村固体废物管理系统的环境影响。采用敏感性分析确定了最具影响力的参数。结果表明，混合废物填埋对环境的影响最大。通过用焚烧代替填埋，可以将环境影响（即全球变暖潜能、陆地酸化潜能、化石资源稀缺、淡水生态毒性潜能）降低约 110%-900%。当收集方案从混合收集改为源头分类时，环境影响也会降低约 50%-200%。然而，将源头分类应用于现有管理系统的环境影响尚不清楚，且取决于分散式堆肥和厌氧消化设施的性能，需要进一步研究。与城市案例相比，农村地区的垃圾填埋场排放的温室气体（GHG）更高，而农村地区的垃圾焚烧厂与城市地区的垃圾焚烧厂 GHG 排放量相似。此外，能源回收是垃圾焚烧系统中最具影响力的过程，该过程的 1%的改进将使全球变暖潜能影响类别取得超过 10%的进展。这些发现有助于改善和发展中国和其他发展中国家的农村生活垃圾处理。
