Abstract
Food waste treatment and utilization is important in sustainable waste management. Unlike most existing studies on environmental impact analysis of food waste treatment technologies, this study conducted both environmental impacts and economic cost analysis of food waste treatment technologies using life cycle assessment and life cycle cost methods. Five promising technologies in China are compared, including anaerobic digestion (AD), aerobic composting combined digestion (AC + AD), aerobic composting (AC), biochemical processor (BP), and anaerobic digestion combined feed processing technology (AD + FP). Results show that the rank of environmental impact is AD + FP > AD > BP > AC + AD > AC, while the rank of LCC is AC + AD > AD + FP > BP > AC > AD. Aerobic technology usually has a lower environmental impact, but slightly higher economic cost compared with anaerobic technology, about 188 CNY/t and 249 CNY/t, respectively. AD + FP has the best environmental performance (4.5E−11/t), and AC + AD has the best economic performance (5.3 CNY/t) due to profits from soil amendment selling. Mixed technologies AC + AD and AD + FP exhibit obvious better cost–benefit efficiency than single treatment technology AC or AD and thus are suggested to be set priority in food waste treatment. BP has relatively good performance and is worthy of consideration for regions with small treatment demand.
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Acknowledgements
This study is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (71974126, 72088101, and 72061127004) and Shanghai Environmental Key Lab of Environmental Data and Intelligence.
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Huijuan Dong and Ziyao Fan contributed to conceptualization, methodology, formal analysis and investigation, and writing—original draft preparation; Huijuan Dong, Yong Geng, and Minoru Fujii performed writing—review and editing; Huijuan Dong and Yong Geng contributed to funding acquisition; and Huijuan Dong performed supervision.
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Fan, Z., Dong, H., Geng, Y. et al. Life cycle cost–benefit efficiency of food waste treatment technologies in China. Environ Dev Sustain 25, 4935–4956 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-022-02251-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10668-022-02251-4