GHG emissions and their influence on climate change and the depletion of fossil fuels are considered to be critical global environmental challenges. GHG emission from MSW management is recognised as an important environmental burden resulting from waste degradation at disposal sites and the combustion of waste. In addition, existing systems use a considerable amount of fossil energy for operational activities which leads to depletion of fossil resources. However, by recovering energy using the above WtE technologies, there is the possibility of contributing to both GHG reductions and fossil resource savings. Therefore, to assess the severity of those crucial impacts, “net GHG emission” and “net fossil resource consumption” are considered as the most relevant environmental indicators in this study.
One very important decisive factor in the sustainability of WtE technologies is whether they are economically viable. A detailed financial analysis via a Life Cycle Cost (LCC) assessment would be an appropriate approach for making decisions on cost effectiveness and economic sustainability within a common LCA framework [5] and [20]. Hence, LCC was selected as the economic indicator to perform the evaluation. However, environmental cost (monetary value for the environmental emissions) was not accounted for in LCC since there is no existing methodology to account for the environmental cost in the Thai context.