Life cycle assessment of capital goods related to waste incineration

The environmental impacts from the life cycle of products and systems were evaluated using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) as a tool. Today most LCAs of waste management systems only considers the impacts from the operation of the system but neglects the environmental impacts from construction, maintenance and demolition of capital goods.

Capital goods are defined as buildings, machinery, trucks and infrastructure at the facility. A LCA was performed using two modelling programmes: Simapro and EASEWASTE. This paper assesses the importance of including capital goods when performing LCAs of waste incineration with efficient energy recovery.

The environmental costs of the capital goods related to an incinerator was assessed and compared to the operation of the incinerator. The environmental loads from the capital goods were found to be insignificant compared to the benefits from the energy recovery from the operation of the system. The reason for this is the significant savings on all impacts categories from energy substitution.

The study also found that the resource consumption for the capital goods is not negligible when assessing the life cycle of an incineration plant.