Environmental Assessment of Municipal Waste Management Scenarios

The European Commission’s (EC) Strategy on the Prevention and Recycling of Waste, as well as the proposed revisions to the European Waste Framework Directive and its up-coming Sustainable Consumption and Production Action Plan, highlight the necessity of life cycle thinking. These reports present the outcomes of 9 preliminary life cycle pilot studies conducted with representatives of the European Union'’s (EU) New Member States for the management of municipal solid waste. These pilot studies emphasise the significant benefits that can be achieved by going beyond compliance with e.g. the EU’s Landfill Directive 1999/31/EC and Packaging Waste Directive 2004/12/EC, as well as some of the potential trade-offs associated with different options and achieving reductions in terms of e.g. emissions that contribute to climate change. Further developments are now focused on more robust life cycle based guidance documents, broader life cycle based sustainability/decoupling indicators, as well as the underlying robust reference data and methods.
 
The reports in pdf format can be downloaded at :

• Environmental Assessment of Municipal Waste Management Scenarios: Part I - Data collection and preliminary environmental assessments for life cycle thinking pilot studies
• Environmental Assessment of Municipal Waste Management Scenarios: Part II -Detailed Life Cycle Assessments