Life Cycle Assessment of Landfill Mining Project

The objective of the research is to develop a life cycle assessment (LCA) model for environmental evaluation of two landfill mining alternatives – on-site sorting of mined waste using mobile sorting equipment or sorting at a centralised waste sorting plant located 12.6 km from the mined territory. Life cycle inventory data is based on the real landfill mining project implemented in Latvia and additional experimental data collected from the scientific papers. The results show that waste sorting at the landfill site succeeds in minimizing the effects to the environment by 28% more than sorting of waste at the centralised plant.