Assessing the sustainability of municipal solid waste management in China 1980 - 2019

The sustainability of the Municipal Solid Waste Management (MSWM) system is one of the crucial issues for achieving sustainable development goals. However, current studies only focus on evaluating certain aspects of the MSWM system at cities level, and it lacks a comprehensive overview of the sustainability of the MSWM system at the national level in China. In addition, many studies only focused on the MSWM system in the urban area, whereas the MSWM system in counties has not been systematically reported in China previously. In this work, we developed an indicator system based on the widely accepted “Wasteaware” benchmark indicator framework, consisting of four dimensions (resource value, environmental impact, economic feasibility, and social aspect) to assess the sustainability of the MSWM system in China from 1980 to 2019. It was found that the MSW generation per unit of living expenditure, recycling rate, and landfill disposal rate dropped from 87.8 g CNY⁻¹ to 16.5 g CNY⁻¹, 20.0% to 17.0%, and 100.0% to 53.3%, respectively, over the last four decades. The controlled disposal rate of MSW increased from 6.9% to 98.5%, while per capita GHGs emissions from the MSW sector rose by 2.5 times. Per capita financial input intensity increased 35 times, and the social score elevated from 8 to 83. It was found that the score of MSWM sustainability decreased from 26 to 12 first in 1980–1994, then rose to 82 from 1994 to 2019. However, the financial input efficiency of MSWM in China showed a sharp decline for both resource value and environmental impact performances, from 5.5 to 0.12 (score) billion CNY⁻¹ and from 6.2 to 0.06 (score) billion CNY⁻¹, respectively. Although the facilities, financial investment, and regulation of the MSWM in China were primarily improved, there are still challenges in reducing MSW generation, promoting recycling, and mitigating greenhouse gas emissions. Policy implications were put forward based on the assessment results.