Identification of environmental impacts associated with municipal solid waste management through life cycle assessment

Even though when the COVID-19 pandemic started, in 2020, the urban cleaning and solid waste management services were not disrupted in Goiânia, Brazil, they were directly affected by social distancing measures. Therefore, the goal of this study was to determine the environmental impacts of municipal solid waste management in the municipality of Goiânia, through life cycle assessment. For this purpose, quantitative data was requested to Companhia de Urbanização de Goiânia regarding waste collection (commingled and source-separated) and final disposal in the unlicensed landfill of Goiânia, between 2016 and 2020. To quantify the environmental impacts, six different scenarios were assessed with EASETECH, a specific life cycle assessment tool for waste, using 12 impact categories. Comparing the data of 2020 with 2019, commingled collection increased 2.2%, while source-separated collection decreased 7.6% than in 2019, mainly due to the changes in eating habits and lifestyle imposed by the pandemic. Concerning environmental impacts, the results indicated that scenario 2, which has the lowest of potentially recyclable waste diversions and relies on an unlicensed landfill, has presented the worst environmental result. Conversely, only by replacing the unlicensed landfill with a licensed one, reduces the environmental impacts between 68.5% and 75%. And when the amount of recycling was gradually increased in Scenario 6, the reduction in environmental impacts exceeded 84%.