Evaluation of municipal solid waste management system of Quito -Ecuador through life cycle assessment approach

Abstract

In Latin America and the Caribbean, the suitable processing of waste through the use oflandfills is around 55%, while the local governments with municipal solid waste (MSW) management plans are around 20%. In Quito, for instance, approximately 2000 ton/day of solid waste are collected, and disposed in El Inga Landfill. The objective of thisstudy is evaluating the MSW management of Quito through Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) approach. For achieving this goal, the ISO 14040 methodology was followed and SimaPro 8.4 was used as analysis software. The functional unit used is 1 ton of MSW, while, the material of study was the waste generated in households, commercial sector, schools and markets; whose values were obtained by the public companies EMASEO-EP, EMGIRS-EP, as well as from the open-access data of the city. The results show that using of biogas from the landfill allows the maximum saving of greenhouse gases (GHG) emissions. Therefore, the biogas plant is the process with less environmental impact. The compaction and transportation of MSW displayed a slightly higher impact comparing with theprevious process, presenting the second-best environmental performance. On the other hand, the leachate treatment shows the greatest environmental impact according to the model, despite of the effluents does not exceed the permissible limits of the environmental Ecuadorian legislation. The researchers consider suitable the analysis of composting and anaerobic digestion techniques as complementary options to reduce this environmental impact, due to the high organic fraction in the analyzed waste.