Management of solid urban waste in Feira de Santana: energy demand and carbon footprint

Municipal Solid Waste Management with the material disposal in landfills is a widely adopted practice in Brazil. The environmental performance quantification in MSWM supports the proposition of optimized practices. The Life Cycle Assessment was applied to evaluate 1 ton of material in the Municipal Solid Waste Management of Feira de Santana, state of Bahia, Brazil. The system boundary of the Municipal Solid Waste Management in this study included the material managed in collection, transportation, treatment, disposal and leachate handling stages. The material disposal in sanitary landfill was evaluated in the base scenario of Municipal Solid Waste Management and the resource recovery options for material (recycling and composting) and energy (sanitary landfill and anaerobic digestion with biogas collection) in the proposed scenarios of Municipal Solid Waste Management. The foreground inventory used representative data for the evaluated scenarios, while the background inventory used the ecoinvent (TM) database in the Simapro (R) software with the Cumulative Energy Demand and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2013 with 100 years global warming potential methods. Cumulative Energy Demand was 215 MJ.t(-1) and Greenhouse Gas emissions were 449 kg CO(2)eq.t(-1) in the base scenario. The largest contribution in the base scenario was the collection and transportation stage in Cumulative Energy Demand and the sanitary landfill in Greenhouse Gas. The proposed scenarios with resource recovery showed a potential to reduce the Cumulative Energy Demand and Greenhouse Gas emissions in Municipal Solid Waste Management, along with supporting the transition to a circular economy.