An Assessment of the Global Warming Potential of Municipal Solid Waste Treatment Scenarios in the Netherlands

Each year, 1.3 billion tons of municipal solid waste (MSW) is generated globally, and this figure is expected to nearly double to 2.2 billion tons by 2025. If this waste is not sustainably treated, it can lead to several harmful environmental impacts including soil pollution, air pollution, and climate change. The Netherlands, however, is one of the several countries beginning to shift their mindset from perceiving waste as a harmful by-product to rather a valuable resource to be used for energy, materials, chemicals, and other sectors. Currently, 97% of MSW incinerated for energy recovery in the Netherlands, yet, there are other alternatives that are potentially more sustainable, such as gasification, which is also becoming increasingly relevant to the Netherlands since the announcement of the construction of a waste gasification-to-methanol in the Port of Rotterdam. This research thus studies the global warming potential (GWP) of this waste gasification-to-methanol technology, gasification-to-energy, and the conventional incineration-to-energy in the Netherlands in 2020, 2030, and 2050 to deduce which would be optimal in terms of climate change mitigation. A comparative attributional life cycle assessment (LCA) is performed to quantify the GWP of each waste treatment and is compared to the GWP of the reference energy or methanol it would likely replace in the market.\n\nIn both of the scenarios developed, gasification-to-methanol results in the largest net GWP reduction when compared to the reference methanol in 2020 and 2030. In 2050, gasification-to-energy is the optimal treatment for both scenarios, however, in the Business-as-Usual-Scenario all treatments lead to an increase in net GWP. This implies that policy and research should instead focus on levels higher in the waste hierarchy such as reduction, re-use, and recycling if climate change mitigation is a priority. Since MSW is still expected to continue to be generated, gasification is a better choice than incineration because it provides flexibility in end products and could produce the energy, chemicals, or materials that are hardest to decarbonize in future decades. It also allows for a flexibility in feedstocks, and if MSW volumes were to decline as set by policy targets, it could adopt other forms of biomass. The issue of sustainable treatment of MSW has no straightforward solutions but does provide the unique opportunity to simultaneously tackle problems of waste management, resource scarcity, and decarbonization of the economy.