Speaker
Description
In the Philippines, solid waste from households contributes up to 56.7% of the total waste produced in the country, and more than 50% of the wastes are biodegradables. Due to limited opportunities for waste diversion, most of the recovered biodegradable waste from these households still ends up in landfills. Community-based recycling technologies must be assessed and promoted to lessen the volume of solid waste transported to landfills and reduce the chances of pollution and other environmental and social im-pacts. This paper aims to analyze the community deployment of a dual-drum composter in Barangay 412, City of Manila, using Life Cycle Assess-ment (LCA). A gate-to-gate analysis from equipment deployment to produc-tion of compost was administered to quantify the most critical flows and processes within the technology and identify the relevant inputs and out-puts. The potential environmental impacts of the technology were then ana-lyzed using openLCA software and the ReCiPe Midpoint method. Invento-ry analysis showed that for a functional unit of one batch of loading, the equivalent inputs are 60 kg organic waste, 22.355 kWh energy usage, 7.00E-03 m3 water, 40 kg inoculant, and 7.15E-02 kg LDPE plastic, and equiva-lent outputs are 96 kg compost, 3.63 kg CO2, 5.22E-02 kg VOC, and 2.34E-01 kg NH3. Finally, the impact assessment showed that the following im-pact categories were relevant to the deployment of the technology: marine eutrophication, water depletion, terrestrial acidification, particulate matter formation, and climate change/global warming potential.
