Greenhouse gas emissions from different municipal solid waste management scenarios in China: Based on carbon and energy flow analysis

Waste management is a major source of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and many opportunities exist to reduce these emissions. To identify the GHG emissions from waste management in China, the characteristics of MSW and the current and future treatment management strategies, five typical management scenarios were modeled by EaseTech software following the principles of life cycle inventory and analyzed based on the carbon and energy flows. Due to the high organic fraction (50-70%) and moisture content (>50%) of Chinese municipal solid waste (MSW), the net GHG emissions in waste management had a significant difference from the developed countries. It was found that the poor landfill gas (LFG) collection efficiency and low carbon storage resulted landfilling with flaring and landfilling with biogas recovery scenarios were the largest GHG emissions (192 and 117 kgCO2-Eq/t, respectively). In contrast, incineration had the best energy recovery rate (19%), and, by grid emissions substitution, led to a substantial decrease in net GHG emissions (−124 kgCO2-Eq/t). Due to the high energy consumption in operation, the unavoidable leakage of CH4 and N2O in treatment, and the further release of CH4 in disposing of the digested residue or composted product, the scenarios with biological treatment of the organic fractions after sorting, such as composting or anaerobic digestion (AD), did not lead to the outstanding GHG reductions (emissions of 32 and −36 kgCO2-Eq/t, respectively) as expected.