Life cycle environmental and energy impact assessment of sustainable urban municipal solid waste collection and transportation strategies

Collection and transportation of municipal solid wastes (MSWs) are essential parts of the sustainable urban municipal solid waste management (MWSM) strategy for municipalities. However, collection and transportation of the MSWs have always been challenging subjects for modelling of integrated MSWM systems by considering environmental and energy parameters. Thus, this study aims to investigate the environmental and energy impacts of urban MSW collection and transportation management systems from the life cycle assessment (LCA) perspective. The LCA approach was applied to the eleven district municipalities of Kayseri province by modelling three alternative MSW collection and transportation scenarios and modelling the current situation of five-metropolitan municipalities. Results showed that construction of transfer stations instead of landfills provide decreased environmental impacts for all impact categories and cumulative energy demand (CED) rates (reduced 44.9 % of the GWP impacts and 51.7 % of the CED scores). Also, it was observed that Scenario 1 consumed lower energy (4.14E + 3 MJ/ton) than other scenarios in terms of the CED results. Hereby, the findings of this work provide a low emission and energy consumption MSWM system modelling guideline and can be applied in municipalities with undeveloped MSWM strategy.