Waste Reduction, Recycling and Climate Change The use of the Life Cycle Analysis tool WRATE Dr Peter Olsen Scottish Environment Protection Agency UCCCfS: Climate Change Action Plans – Planning & Implementation Dundee College Dundee 11 th May 2009

Life Cycle Assessment  Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a methodology for assessing the potential environmental impacts of a product or service across its entire life cycle, or cradle to grave It’s

Life Cycle Assessment

LCA  Using LCA has many advantages:  Often its an ‘eye opener’, providing an insight into systems and their alternatives  It can confirm expected environmental impacts and reveal completely unexpected impact

LCA  However, the results of LCA should not be used in isolation to decide on one option over another  LCA is one of many decision-support tools.

LCA  It is also necessary to consider economic and social factors, as well as those environmental factors that cannot be quantified using LCA

WRATE  The software SEPA use to undertake the LCA of waste management options is called WRATE (Waste and Resource Assessment Tool for the Environment). WRATE was developed for the Environment Agency to replace the tool used to assess the Area Waste Plans when they were first developed, WISARD

WRATE  LCA of waste management systems is different from a product LCA, in that the cradle- to-grave approach is applied only to the waste management infrastructure.

WRATE

 Wrate does not include the life cycle of the products that are now being treated as waste, they are only included in the system once they become waste

WRATE  Designed to model household waste but can be adapted for single waste streams.

 WRATE models:  Non renewable resource Depletion  Freshwater Ecotoxicity  Acidification  Eutrophication  Global warming  Human toxicity  Land use WRATE

 When a waste management process generates a useable output, such as recycling or energy from waste, there are environmental impacts from the treatment of those materials, emissions etc.  There is also avoided impacts, i.e. where the requirement for the production of energy from more conventional sources is avoided.  This is accounted for by subtracting impacts of e.g. generating energy from waste from the impact of generating energy from coal or gas

WRATE  A key aspect of interpreting the results from WRATE is to understand the concept of avoided impacts  negative numbers mean that the burden of waste management system is effectively avoided

Typical WRATE analysis of different waste management options

Scenario comparisons  A College collects the following:  100 tonnes of paper  1000 tonnes of food waste  100 tonnes of drink cans  500 tonnes of glass  100 tonnes of plastic

Which treatment will have the biggest impact in terms of global warming  Landfill it all ?  Burn it all in an energy from waste plant?  Recycle it all?

All to landfill

All to Energy from Waste

Full recycling

Equivalencies  WRAT can report impacts in two ways  CO2 equivalents  This takes into account the Global Warming impact of different elements and display them as kgs of Carbon Dioxide  EUr person equivalents  converts the impact to the amount of CO2 an average European person would emit

Global Warming Potential

Where are the burdens?

 Landfill, collection, treatment and transportation have direct impacts whereas recycling see’s the biggest avoided impact

Where are the burdens in the landfill?

Landfill burdens  around 250 tonnes CO 2 eq, is associated with construction and operation of the landfill

Where are the burdens in the landfill collection?  202 tonnes from the production of large skips

Where are the avoided burdens in Recycling?

Aluminium

 Almost 800 tonnes of fossil CO 2 (or 62 Eur. Persons) is avoided by recycling 75 tonnes of aluminium

Waste Reduction, Recycling and Climate Change The use of the Life Cycle Analysis tool WRATE Dr Peter Olsen Scottish Environment Protection Agency UCCCfS: Climate Change Action Plans – Planning & Implementation Dundee College Dundee 11 th May 2009