Application of Life Cycle Assessments in Waste Management

The application of Life cycle thinking and Life cycle assessment as decision-making tools in drafting waste management policies has risen globally. However, regions such as Africa are still lagging. This paper, therefore, reviews life cycle studies in municipal solid waste management, including plastic waste, which have been conducted to date and forms part of a broader study assessing the environmental impacts of various plastic waste management scenarios in South Africa. All the selected studies encompass gasification as one of the processes. The key finding is that studies involving gasification are limited and therefore present an untapped opportunity for research. There is potential to employ gasification as an environmentally friendly process to handle solid waste. However, since LCAs are location specific, in its efforts to reduce the amount of waste landfilled or indiscriminately dumped, Africa needs to carry out its own LCAs to determine if gasification can be considered part of waste management plans across the continent.