Search

The management of municipal solid waste is a crucial issue to address as we move toward the decarbonization of urban contexts. Not by chance, this sector plays a relevant role in the Covenant of Mayors program, whereby municipalities are called to design their own Sustainable Energy Action Plans (SECAPs). However, despite new regulations strongly pushing the recycling and reuse of materials contained in municipal waste, many cities still use large landfills. As part of the overall environmental pressure exerted by these urban systems, the transport of waste from collection points to landfills or treatment facilities must be considered in order to correctly assess the full environmental burden of waste management. To this aim, in this paper, the Ecological Footprint method is applied to the municipal solid waste management system of the city of Palermo (Sicily). The results show that the impacts produced by the means of transport used, both in the status quo and in the assumed enhanced scenario (with less municipal waste disposed to landfills in favor of recycling), are significant compared to those caused by the other segments of the waste management system. The concept of a "saved footprint" is also introduced here, in order to properly compare the two scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A simplified version of the ecological footprint method is proposed for assessing the environmental performances of urban transportation systems. The method, starting from the knowledge of the composition of the running vehicular fleet, is here applied to a southern Italian province. It represents a synthetic indicator of the environmental pressure exerted by the system also matching the pollutant emissions with the carrying capacity of the site. Particularly, the forested area needed to absorb the CO2 emissions of the system is compared with the total forested area of the province. The results of the case-study indicates the yearly maximum distance that each vehicle of the fleet can cover in order for their emissions to be absorbed by the surrounding forested area. Specifically, if all cars of the fleet would travel for 10,000 km/year, 97% of the forested area would be involved. Thanks to its features, this indicator can be usefully adopted for ranking different transportation options. Therefore, it could allow local administrations to environmentally hierarchize alternative plans concerning urban transportation choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]