Evaluation of municipal organic waste management using life cycle assessment: Case study of Antalya

In the last century, the world population has tripled. And also consumer habits, welfare and education status which have a big impact on solid waste production changed dramatically. Managing solid waste problem is getting difficult due to critical changes in waste production and composition. Solid waste management (SWM) has become more important municipal issue because of the rise of environmental and health awareness. In this thesis, determination of moisture, elemental and heavy metal analysis of waste samples in Antalya municipality are made. These data and literature are used to create scenarios and determine environmental impact with using Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology. In order to apply LCA, create waste disposal scenarios and compare result GaBi 6 software are used. Landfill, composting and anaerobic digestion are scenarios which are created. Scenario limits doesn't include production and transportation of the waste. According to chosen impact categories, the scenario which has the least impact on environment is composting through evaluation of LCA. The results from methods which are compared on specified impacts categories are evaluated through last and open to interpretation part of LCA.