The plastic waste dilemma has gained international attention because of increased public awareness and the rise of waste import bans. Sorting and recycling technologies that deal with plastic waste streams exist but face challenges in highly dense urbanized regions such as Singapore because of high space requirements. Multiple small-scale plastic sorting and recycling facilities that are distributed closer to points of waste generation offer the possibility of increasing the recovery of plastic-waste streams in urbanized settings. To holistically quantify the environmental performance of this type of system, a life cycle assessment (LCA) is conducted to compare five different scenarios of distributed and centralized sorting and recycling of plastic bottles and takeaway containers in Singapore. A hybrid simulation model is used to simulate the complex dynamics of waste-processing systems which involves waste generation, collection scheduling, sorting, recycling, and disposal of residual materials. The results of the LCA showed that the life cycle environmental impacts to climate change, water depletion, and terrestrial ecotoxicity of the distributed scenarios were higher than the centralized scenarios by 7–30% depending on the impact category. Although the distributed scenarios had lower total travel distances, their reliance on commercial vans led to their higher environmental impacts than the centralized scenarios. The findings of this study provide motivation for future research in applying hybrid simulation models in LCAs of waste-to-resource exchange networks. The data used to carry out the hybrid simulations and the LCA are provided as Supporting Information. This article met the requirements for a Gold-Silver JIE data openness badge described at http://jie.click/badges.

中文翻译：

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比较分布式与集中式塑料回收系统的环境性能：将混合仿真建模应用于生命周期评估

由于公众意识的提高和废物进口禁令的兴起，塑料废物的困境引起了国际关注。存在处理塑料废物流的分类和回收技术，但由于空间要求高，在新加坡等高度密集的城市化地区面临挑战。分布在废物产生点附近的多个小型塑料分类和回收设施为提高城市化环境中塑料废物流的回收率提供了可能性。为了全面量化此类系统的环境绩效，我们进行了生命周期评估 (LCA)，以比较新加坡塑料瓶和外卖容器的分布式和集中分类和回收的五种不同场景。混合模拟模型用于模拟废物处理系统的复杂动态，其中涉及废物产生、收集调度、分类、回收和剩余材料的处置。LCA 的结果表明，根据影响类别，分布式情景对气候变化、水资源枯竭和陆地生态毒性的生命周期环境影响比集中情景高 7-30%。尽管分布式场景的总行驶距离较短，但与集中式场景相比，它们对商用货车的依赖导致其对环境的影响更大。本研究的结果为未来研究在废物资源交换网络的 LCA 中应用混合模拟模型提供了动力。用于执行混合模拟和 LCA 的数据作为支持信息提供。这篇文章符合金银的要求JIE数据开放徽章在 http://jie.click/badges 中描述。