Analysis of the “Zero Waste” Management Option Using the Municipal Solid Waste Decision Support Tool

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Office of Research and Development (US EPA ORD) has developed a “Municipal Solid Waste Decision Support Tool”, or MSW-DST, for local government solid waste managers to use for the life cycle evaluation of integrated solid waste management options. The MSW-DST was developed over a five year period (1994–1999) with the assistance of numerous outside contractors and organizations, including the Research Triangle Institute, North Carolina State University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, the Environmental Research and Education Foundation, Franklin Associates and Roy F. Weston. The MSW-DST can be used to quantify and evaluate the following impacts for each integrated solid waste management alternative: • Energy consumption, • Air emissions, • Water pollutant discharges, • Solid Waste disposal impacts. Recently, the MSW-DST was used by the U.S. EPA to identify solid waste management strategies that would help to meet the goal of the EPA’s “Resource Conservation Challenge.” In this effort, ten solid waste management strategies were evaluated for a hypothetical, medium-sized U.S. community, with a population of 750,000 and a waste generation rate of approximately 3.5 pounds per person per day. (Table 1). The assumed waste composition was based on national averages. A peer-reviewed paper on this research was published in 2008 by the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).