Life-cycle Assessment Of Municipal Solid Waste Incineration In A Typical Chinese Eco-industrial Park

China has witnessed rapid industrialization and urbanization over the past several decades and also an unprecedented environmental stress,such as the generation of municipal solid waste.China's industrial parks have been playing a crucial role in facilitating local economy development by aggregating intensive manufacturing activities in a same place.They accounted for about 50%of local gross industrial output value in East China.Sharing energy infrastructure is a common practice in Chinese industrial park.Greening their energy infrastructures and reducing their coal dependence will attach great importance to mitigate their environmental impact.MSW-to-energy was proposed as one of the key measures to mitigate the greenhouse gas emissions of the Chinese EIPs and to lessen their coal dependence.We identified that 54.6%of the in-use MSW incinerators have been located in industrial parks in 2014.The aim of this study is to identify the environmental benefits of MSW incinerators in industrial parks from the perspective of life cycle thinking.This study assessed the life cycle environmental impact of MSW-to-energy incinerators located in industrial park and compared it with two references,landfilling with energy recovery and coal-fired combined heat and power?CHP?in the context of the Chinese eco-industrial park.The LCA study is based on site-specific data of an in-use MSW-to-energy facility located in an eco-industrial park,by employing the guideline of standard defined by the International Organization for Standardization.It also aims at identifying the environmental hot spots of MSW incinerators and producing useful knowledge to reduce the environmental footprint of MSW incinerators in Chinese industrial parks.The key findings indicate that MSW incineration outperforms both landfilling with energy recovery and coal-fired CHP in the four categories of environmental impact considered in this study,such as the global warming potential,acidification potential,eutrophication potential,and human toxicity potential will be 141 kg CO₂-eq?-37%?,0.733kg SO₂-eq?-67%?,0.025 kg Phosphate-eq?-34%?,and 135 kg DCB-eq?-94%?lower than coal-fired CHP,respectively.The results nevertheless present a high sensitivity related to the boiler efficiency and flue gas control technologies in both the incineration facility and the coal-fired CHP reference.It is proved that the steam-to-electricity ratio indicates that the direct emissions of pollutants per unit of energy produced could be reduced by 30 to 40%due to higher energy utilization.This promising result,however,does not concern the life-cycle impacts of the process.Further studies are thus needed to fully understand the influence of the energy output from municipal solid waste incineration.This study also compared with similar LCA results in literature and found that there is still some room for improvement.In case of employing better emission control technologies and wise use of residual steam,further environmental benefits could be achieved.One of the key measures to improve the life cycle performance is to improve the quality of the municipal solid waste by implementing source-separation and advanced pretreatment,thus the lower calorific value could be improved substantially.Decreasing the moisture content of MSW would considerably increase the amount of recovered energy and further reduce coal consumption in the park.The Chinese industrial parks seem to be a reasonable place to locate MSW incineration plants because they could address the issue of energy efficiency with combined heat and power?CHP?generation and steam could be sent to surrounding industries in geographic proximity following the principles of industrial symbiosis.