Environmental Assessment of Waste Management

This project is part of the research program ”Tools for Sustainable Waste Management”, financed by the Swedish Environmental Protection Agency. The aim of the project is to contribute to sustainable waste management by assessing the effectiveness of waste policy instruments with regard to life-cycle environmental impacts. Such policy instrument will be proposed by another project within this research program. Waste and environmental process data of the Swedish waste management system will be compiled in a generally accessible data package, and further implemented in a generic LCA-tool, which will be used to assess life cycle environmental impacts of policy instruments. Substance flow analysis (SFA) will be used as a complement for more detailed analyses of the risk of increased and/or uncontrolled flows of hazardous substances.

Key words: waste management, life cycle assessment, policy instruments

Project team: Anna Björklund, Ola Eriksson (HiG), Maria Ljunggren-Söderman (IVL), Åsa Stenmark (IVL)

Funding: Swedish Environmental Protection Agency

Period: 2007-2011

Contact person: Anna Björklund