Improved life cycle assessment of recycling organic wastes for practice

Abstract Life cycle assessment (LCA) is widely employed for evaluating waste management and recycling technologies. However traditional LCA analytical method has limitations in boundary setting and indicators selection. It is necessary to find a way to improve LCA. This paper focuses two outstanding issues in traditional LCA method: the boundary-setting and indicators amendment. On the one hand, based on traditional indicators, this paper extends study on local concern pollutants indicator system, local or national endowments, and efficiency titles. On the other hand, from the temporal dimension, i.e. short term, medium term and long term, and the spatial dimension, i.e. local, national and global level, this paper establishes a more comprehensive analysis framework. These two aspects together form an indicators matrix. So the assessment makers can be classified into three categories, enterprises, governments or public. A case study was undertaken to carry out quantitative assessment between straw-made biomass pellets technology and straw-made biogas technology. The results proved that traditional LCA is lack of the ability to thoroughly and specifically analysis the comprehensive effect of one technology, while the amended indicators matrix in this paper can reflect the behavior entity's evaluation difference to one technology in temporal or spatial dimension. The improved LCA and sensitivity analysis implicates that traditional LCA usually prefers straw-made biomass pellets technology, while improved LCA sometimes prefers straw-made biogas technology. The improved LCA method is more suitable for reflecting the reality and scientizing decision-making.