Allocation and 'what-if' scenarios in life cycle assessment of waste management systems.

摘要: Many modern waste treatment processes and management systems are able to treat many different types of at the same time, deliver a number useful outputs (secondary materials, energy) as well. These thus increasingly multi-functional. As such, in life cycle assessment studies, they create problems related multi-functionality allocation. Especially LCAs systems, solution form system expansion or avoided burdens approach dominates practice, partitioning plays minor role. In this paper, we analyse logic these two approaches. It appears that for approach, 'what-if' assumptions is so large on topic lead quite diverging results. Since questions cannot be answered an unambiguous way, such should preferably left outside primarily scientific tool. The not free from arbitrary choices well, but, contrast approaches, it does claim predict what happens would have happened.