Bisinella et al. (2021) modelled, by consequential life-cycle assessment (LCA), the retrofit of moving-grate municipal solid waste incineration (MSWI) plants with post-combustion monoethanolamine (MEA) carbon capture and storage (CCS), finding a climate saving of roughly 700 kg CO2-eq per tonne of wet waste in a near-future energy system, governed above all by the assumed 85% capture efficiency. The study is an explicitly model-based early quantification: its conclusions record that CCS in MSWI 'is very much in its infancy, and full-scale examples have not been identified'; permanent CO2 storage siting is declared beyond its scope; its transport and storage legs rest on fixed generic assumptions (about 1000 km transport, about 1% transport loss, 2% storage loss); its results are point estimates from one-at-a-time sensitivity analysis, with a complete uncertainty analysis left for later evaluation; toxic flows are discussed only where results are extreme, because of the much higher uncertainty attached to their quantification and characterisation; and the economic, regulatory and permitting feasibility of transport and storage for many dispersed sources is not addressed. Subsequent model-based LCAs consistently reproduce the direction of the climate benefit, but none is grounded in published full-scale operational data; a 2025 review counts only four waste-to-energy (WtE) capture plants worldwide, all using the captured CO2 rather than storing it; transport-and-storage LCA practice remains inconsistent; and site-specific, uncertainty-propagated assessments of MSWI-CCS with geological storage have not been reported. The open core is the empirical, uncertainty-quantified validation of the modeled climate benefit at commercial scale.

Background

Municipal solid waste incineration (MSWI) is a widely used technology for treating residual (post-recycling) municipal waste, recovering electricity and heat from combustion; in Europe it is one of the largest clustered point sources of CO2, emitting close to one tonne of CO2 per tonne of waste, of which roughly 60% is biogenic carbon (carbon from recently grown biomass, conventionally treated as climate-neutral in life-cycle accounting). Post-combustion carbon capture with aqueous monoethanolamine (MEA), the benchmark solvent-absorption process used in power and industrial applications, can be retrofitted to the flue gas of such plants; coupling it with geological CO2 storage (CCS) can in principle turn waste incineration into a net CO2 remover, since the biogenic share of the stored CO2 counts as negative emissions. Assessing whether this is environmentally worthwhile requires life-cycle assessment (LCA), here performed in the consequential variant with system expansion: emissions and burdens of the plant are netted against credits for the electricity and heat that the plant's exports displace, so results depend on the carbon intensity of the surrounding energy system and on the energy the capture unit itself consumes (steam for solvent regeneration, electricity for compression). Bisinella et al. (2021) provided the first configuration-resolved LCA of this retrofit for representative moving-grate MSWI plants (a moving grate, the dominant incineration furnace type, conveys the waste through the combustion zone on a travelling grate; five base configurations plus CCS-amended variants, modelled in EASETECH, a life-cycle assessment software for waste systems, with Ecoinvent life-cycle inventory data). They found that about 822 kg of compressed CO2 can be captured per tonne of wet waste at an assumed 85% capture efficiency (total incineration CO2 being about 968 kg/t, from 264 kg C/t of waste); that the capture unit reduces net electricity output by roughly one-third (power-only) to one-half (combined heat and power) but that climate-change impacts nonetheless improve by about 700 kg CO2-eq (carbon-dioxide equivalents) per tonne in a near-future Danish energy system, approaching the algebraic upper bound of capture efficiency times total waste-carbon CO2 as the energy system decarbonises; that capture efficiency is the single most influential parameter (a 10% change produces about a 13% change in the climate result); and that changes in the other thirteen midpoint impact categories (midpoint indicators quantify an environmental impact at an intermediate point of the cause-effect chain, such as acidification, eutrophication, or toxicity, before any final-damage aggregation) are marginal compared with differences between plant configurations. The paper contains no closing list of open questions; what it leaves unestablished are limitations and untested assumptions of its own model: (1) no full-scale operational experience with MEA-based capture at commercial MSWI plants existed - the paper reports that it had not identified any MSWI plant employing CCS - leaving long-term solvent degradation rates, pollutant-induced solvent losses, real integration losses and maintenance-related disruptions uncertain; (2) the model used fixed logistics assumptions (on the order of 1000 km CO2 transport with about 1% transport and 2% storage losses); the paper's own sensitivity test varied only these loss rates and found the effect small (doubling both adds about 33 kg CO2-eq per tonne, 'not significant in terms of the overall results'), while transport distance, transport mode and permanent storage siting remained generic assumptions, siting being declared beyond the paper's scope; (3) the economic, regulatory and permitting feasibility of large-scale CO2 transport and storage for many dispersed MSWI sources was not addressed; (4) reliably achieving high capture efficiency in variable, impurity-laden MSWI flue gas at scale was assumed (85%) rather than demonstrated; (5) toxicity and other midpoint characterization factors, especially for amine degradation products (about 4 kg of MEA consumed and about 0.1 kg of NH3 released per tonne of CO2 captured) and capture-process residues (about 4 kg of solid waste per tonne of CO2 captured, disregarded in the study), carried substantial methodological uncertainty, and the toxic flows were discussed only where results were extreme; and (6) the results were point estimates from one-at-a-time sensitivity analysis, the paper noting that the full importance of the model parameters should be evaluated after a complete uncertainty analysis.

Problem Statement

Building on the model-based LCA of Bisinella et al. (2021), whose conclusions record that CCS in MSWI 'is very much in its infancy, and full-scale examples have not been identified', the problem is to establish, with the best available operational evidence and quantified uncertainty, the real-world environmental performance of retrofitting municipal solid waste incineration (MSWI) plants with post-combustion MEA carbon capture and storage - replacing the assumption-based generic life-cycle model (85% capture efficiency, about 822 kg of compressed CO2 per tonne of wet waste, a climate saving of about 700 kg CO2-eq per tonne in a near-future energy system, and fixed CO2 transport and storage assumptions of roughly 1000 km transport with about 1% transport and 2% storage losses) with the best available operational performance data. The question is whether the modeled climate saving and its dominance by capture efficiency hold at commercial scale, or must be revised, once the best available operational data replace the model assumptions, and which parts of the modeled saving remain unvalidated, since no waste-to-energy plant yet operates MEA capture with geological storage. The life-cycle assessment of the retrofit is chain-specific and uncertainty-quantified, built on the best available operational performance data of commercial-scale MEA capture units operating on waste-to-energy (WtE) plants - achieved capture efficiency under dynamic, impurity-laden flue gas, solvent consumption and long-term degradation, real energy penalties and availability losses from integration and maintenance. It resolves (a) a re-assessment of climate-change and non-climate life-cycle impacts using such data, in which the assessed chain - a documented CO2 transport and geological-storage chain for a representative moving-grate MSWI plant in a stated near-future energy system, selected and justified by the solver - has its transport and storage logistics specified from published design or literature values for that chain, with their provenance and uncertainty stated, instead of being carried over as generic fixed assumptions, and in which the fate and effect characterization of amine degradation products and capture-process residues - that is, the characterization factors (the per-unit-emission factors converting an emission into an impact contribution) for human and ecotoxicity - is examined to determine whether it is good enough to test the source's conclusion that changes in the non-climate categories are marginal, any inadequacy being stated; and (b) an uncertainty treatment that goes beyond one-at-a-time sensitivity analysis, so that the per-tonne climate saving carries a stated uncertainty range together with the conditions under which it holds. Economic, regulatory and permitting feasibility for dispersed MSWI sources - advanced at assessment level by 2024-2026 techno-economic and sociotechnical studies but unproven by any operating WtE-CCS-with-storage plant - is background context for the same objective and is not part of the research problem.

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