Application of LCA at local level to test the viability of PAYT systems in Southern Europe: state of the art and new strategies

摘要: The adoption of Pay-as-you-throw (PAYT) waste tariff systems intended for collection and treatment of Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) is experiencing a slow progress in Southern Europe with only a small number of local applications reported (European Commission 2012; Puig-Ventosa 2008; Simão Pires 2013), comparatively with the situation in Central and Northern Europe, where PAYT schemes have found a widespread application (Elia, Gnoni, and Tornese 2015; Reichenbach 2008). The public lack of knowledge in these countries about the potential environmental benefits associated to PAYT systems is one of the barriers preventing PAYT implementation. The application of Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) techniques seems to be a suitable approach to better expose these benefits. Analysing the performance of waste management systems through the LCA technique is increasingly becoming a common practice (Pires, Martinho, and Chang 2011), taking advantage of its capacity to identify the environmentally critical points within a given process. This ability has been improved over time thanks to the sound and extensive research work done by several authors and institutions (Bjarnadóttir et al. 2002; Clift, Doig, and Finnveden 2000; JRC 2011). Regardless of these advances, public administrators are still not always aware of the potential of this analysing tool, and thus rely more on financial issues rather than on environmental priorities when taking decisions (Blengini et al. 2012).Moreover, it has been pointed out that the application of LCA to specific waste management case studies poses a broad challenge, given the complexity of the …