Various municipal solid waste management (MSWM) innovations have emerged in developing countries in face of the challenges posed by increasing waste generation and poor MSWM practice. We present a methodology to assess the potential sustainability impact of MSWM innovations in a holistic manner. The Life Cycle Sustainability Analysis (LCSA) framework and the United Nations (UN) sustainable development goals (SDGs) facilitated the methodology development. The result of applying the methodology to the case of waste bank (WB) in Bandung City shows that WB potentially generates the greatest sustainability impact in the resource recovery phase and the smallest impact in the collection and final disposal phase. All negative impacts could arise in the economic dimension. Surprisingly, WB as a national strategy to achieve 3Rs would not effectively solve Bandung City’s landfill problem. Almost all SDGs would benefit from the WB program under the assumed conditions. This methodology will facilitate the decision-making in MSWM by (1) comparing available innovations to find the optimal solution, (2) identifying the hot spots and taking measures to combat the negative impacts, (3) providing the basis for monitoring the implementation process and the ex-post performance assessment.

Targets to reduce global warming impacts of the transportation sector may lead to increased land use and negative land quality changes. The aim of this paper is to implement the Land Use Indicator Calculation in Life Cycle Assessment (LANCA^®) model to assess land quality impacts and land use efficiencies (concerning occupation and transformation) of different example renewable transport energy systems for passenger cars. In addition, the land use impacts are normalized according to the Soil Quality Index building on LANCA^® and included in the environmental footprint. The assessment is based on information from GaBi life cycle assessment software databases and on literature. Functional unit of the model is to provide annual drive of 18,600 km for a passenger car in the EU. The analysis includes examples of biomass, electricity, electricity to fuels and fossil-based energy systems. Our findings confirm previous research that biomass-based transport energy systems have risks to lead to significantly higher land occupation and transformation impacts than do fossil oil or electricity-based ones. According to the LANCA^® model, methane from Finnish wood and German corn has the highest impacts on filtration and the physicochemical filtration reduction potential. Sugarcane ethanol and palm oil diesel systems, on the other hand, lead to the highest erosion potential. Electricity-based transportation energy systems appear to be superior to biomass-based ones from the perspectives of land occupation, land transformation, and soil quality impacts for the selected examples. Land quality impacts should be taken into account when developing and expanding renewable transportation energy systems. The paper shows that the LANCA^® method is applicable for the assessment of transport systems in order to provide extended information on environmental sustainability, which should be included more often in future analysis. However, it can be challenging to interpret underlaying assumptions, especially when aggregated information is used from databases.