Life cycle assessment and the work environment: Case study in municipal solid waste end-of-life management methods

The purpose of this research is to provide decision makers with better information to make policy recommendations that promote sustainability in the management of municipal solid waste (MSW). Management methods evaluated in this research include energy-from-waste and landfilling. Life cycle assessment (LCA) is a decision support tool used to evaluate MSW management methods to decide which is best in terms of impacts on the environment, both at the local and global scale. Life cycle assessment, as a method, evaluates environmental impacts across a product system, from raw material acquisition through end-of-life management; it considers inputs and outputs and evaluates them as a system of interdependent parts. The goal of this research is to expand the scope of existing MSW LCA methods to include impacts to occupational health, a category often neglected in LCA due to data limitations, methodological limitations, and lack of professional subject matter expertise. Decisions made in the absence of quantified occupational health data may result in sub-optimization, where one portion of a system may be improved ignoring the effects on another portion of the system, leading to unintended consequences. This research demonstrates how occupational health data can inform LCA to ensure these impacts are no longer neglected.