Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis on the Use of LCA to Assess the Environmental Impacts of the Composting Process

Laís Fabiana Serafini, Manuel Feliciano, Manuel Angelo Rodrigues and Artur Gonçalves ()
Additional contact information
Laís Fabiana Serafini: Centro de Investigação de Montanha (CIMO), Instituto Politécnico de Bragança, Campus de Santa Apolónia, 5300-253 Bragança, Portugal
Manuel Feliciano: Centro de Investigação de Montanha (CIMO), Instituto Politécnico de Bragança, Campus de Santa Apolónia, 5300-253 Bragança, Portugal
Manuel Angelo Rodrigues: Centro de Investigação de Montanha (CIMO), Instituto Politécnico de Bragança, Campus de Santa Apolónia, 5300-253 Bragança, Portugal
Artur Gonçalves: Centro de Investigação de Montanha (CIMO), Instituto Politécnico de Bragança, Campus de Santa Apolónia, 5300-253 Bragança, Portugal

Sustainability, 2023, vol. 15, issue 2, 1-33

Abstract: Following the industrial revolution, major economic and populational growth took place, and, therefore, solid waste generation increased exponentially. Nowadays, waste management still generates major impacts because the current wide offer of waste management strategies includes many solutions that produce suboptimal results, such as landfill or waste incineration. From a circular economy perspective, composting is a potentially sustainable option to treat the organic fraction of solid waste and has the advantage of recycling many organic compounds that can be reintroduced into the natural processes. This study aimed to provide a meta-analysis using the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) method to evaluate the impacts of composting by performing a systematic literature review of the diversity of approaches and assessing environmental impacts. The results of the impact assessment were highly dependent on the choices made over the system boundary and the functional units. The most cited environmental impacts were Global Warming Potential, Acidification Potential, Eutrophication Potential, Photochemical Oxidation Potential, and Ozone Layer Depletion, as gaseous emissions from the transport and decomposition represent the main contributors to these categories. Using a smaller dataset and evaluating the use of the CML method and the most cited impacts categories, it was found that In-vessel Composting and Home Composting were considered the best environmental options among the studied composting methods. Composting environmental impacts were also highly related to the use of non-renewable energy sources, which puts composting at a disadvantage when compared with the use of anaerobic digestion. Such results emphasize the benefits of using these waste management technologies as complementary instead of substitutes.

Keywords: composting; Life Cycle Assessment; literature review; metadata analysis; environmental impacts (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/2/1394/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/15/2/1394/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:15:y:2023:i:2:p:1394-:d:1032456

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().