Allocation and ‘what-if’ scenarios in life cycle assessment of waste management systems

Many modern waste treatment processes and waste management systems are able to treat many different types of waste at the same time, and deliver a number of useful outputs (secondary materials, energy) as well. These systems are thus increasingly multi-functional. As such, in life cycle assessment studies, they create problems related to multi-functionality and allocation. Especially in LCAs of waste management systems, the solution in the form of system expansion or avoided burdens approach dominates the practice, and the partitioning approach plays a minor role. In this paper, we analyse the logic and problems of these two approaches. It appears that for the avoided burdens approach, the number of ‘what-if’ assumptions is so large that LCAs on the same topic lead to quite diverging results. Since ‘what-if’ questions cannot be answered in an unambiguous way, such questions should preferably be left outside of a primarily scientific tool. The partitioning approach is not free from arbitrary choices as well, but, in contrast to the ‘what-if’ approaches, it does not claim to predict what happens or what would have happened.