Environmental and economic evaluation of pre-disaster plans for disaster waste management: Case study of Minami-Ise, Japan

Although it is important that disaster waste be demolished and removed as soon as possible after a natural disaster, it is also important that its treatment is environmentally friendly and economic. Local municipalities do not conduct environmental and economic feasibility studies of pre-disaster waste management; nevertheless, pre-disaster waste management is extremely important to promote treatment of waste after natural disasters. One of the reasons that they cannot conduct such evaluations is that the methods and inventory data required for the environmental and economic evaluation does not exist. In this study, we created the inventory data needed for evaluation and constructed evaluation methods using life cycle assessment (LCA) and life cycle cost (LCC) methodologies for future natural disasters. We selected the Japanese town of Minami-Ise for the related case study. Firstly, we estimated that the potential disaster waste generation derived from dwellings would be approximately 554,000 t. Based on this result, the land area required for all the temporary storage sites for storing the disaster waste was approximately 55 ha. Although the public domain and private land area in this case study is sufficient, several sites would be necessary to transport waste to other sites with enough space because local space is scarce. Next, we created inventory data of each process such as waste transportation, operation of the temporary storage sites, and waste treatment. We evaluated the environmental burden and cost for scenarios in which the disaster waste derived from specified kinds of home appliances (refrigerators, washing machines, air-conditioners and TV sets) was transported, stored and recycled. In the scenario, CO2, SOx, NOX and PM emissions and total cost were 142 t, 7 kg, 257 kg, 38 kg and 1772 thousand USD, respectively. We also focused on SOx emission as a regional pollution source because transportation and operation of the temporary storage sites generates air pollution. If the treatment of all waste were finished in 3 years, the environmental standard would be satisfied by setting work duration to 4.8 h/d.