IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/recore/v102y2015icp58-66.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Importance of food waste pre-treatment efficiency for global warming potential in life cycle assessment of anaerobic digestion systems

Author

Listed:
  • Carlsson, My
  • Naroznova, Irina
  • Møller, Jacob
  • Scheutz, Charlotte
  • Lagerkvist, Anders

Abstract

A need for improvement of food waste (FW) pre-treatment methods has been recognized, but few life cycle assessments (LCA) of FW management systems have considered the pre-treatment with respect to input energy, loss of organic material and nutrients for anaerobic digestion (AD) and/or further treatment of the refuse. The objective of this study was to investigate how FW pre-treatment efficiency impacts the environmental performance of waste management, with respect to global warming potential (GWP). The modeling tool EASETECH was used to perform consequential LCA focusing on the impact of changes in mass distribution within framework conditions that were varied with respect to biogas utilization and energy system, representing different geographical regions and/or different time-frames. The variations of the GWP due to changes in pre-treatment efficiency were generally small, especially when biogas and refuse were substituting the same energy carriers, when energy conversion efficiencies were high and slurry quality good enough to enable digestate use on land. In these cases other environmental aspects, economy and practicality could be guiding when selecting pre-treatment system without large risk of sub-optimization with regards to GWP. However, the methane potential of the slurry is important for the net LCA results and must be included in the sensitivity analysis. Furthermore, when biogas is used as vehicle fuel the importance of pre-treatment is sensitive to assumptions and approach of modelling marginal energy which must be decided based on the focus and timeframe of the study in question.

Suggested Citation

  • Carlsson, My & Naroznova, Irina & Møller, Jacob & Scheutz, Charlotte & Lagerkvist, Anders, 2015. "Importance of food waste pre-treatment efficiency for global warming potential in life cycle assessment of anaerobic digestion systems," Resources, Conservation & Recycling, Elsevier, vol. 102(C), pages 58-66.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:recore:v:102:y:2015:i:c:p:58-66
    DOI: 10.1016/j.resconrec.2015.06.012
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921344915300306
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.resconrec.2015.06.012?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Wojciech Dronia & Jacek Połomka & Andrzej Jędrczak, 2024. "Quantity and Material Composition of Foreign Bodies in Bio-Waste Collected in Towns from Single- and Multi-Family Housing and in Rural Areas," Energies, MDPI, vol. 17(17), pages 1-16, August.
    2. Spyridoula Gerassimidou & Manoj Dora & Eleni Iacovidou, 2022. "A Tool for the Selection of Food Waste Management Approaches for the Hospitality and Food Service Sector in the UK," Resources, MDPI, vol. 11(10), pages 1-27, September.
    3. Alonso Albalate-Ramírez & Alejandro Padilla-Rivera & Juan Felipe Rueda-Avellaneda & Brenda Nelly López-Hernández & José Julián Cano-Gómez & Pasiano Rivas-García, 2024. "Mapping the Sustainability of Waste-to-Energy Processes for Food Loss and Waste in Mexico—Part 1: Energy Feasibility Study," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 16(14), pages 1-18, July.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:recore:v:102:y:2015:i:c:p:58-66. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Kai Meng (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://www.journals.elsevier.com/resources-conservation-and-recycling .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.