Proceedings Venice 2014, Fifth International Symposium on Energy from Biomass and Waste San Servolo, Venice, Italy; 17 - 20 November 2014  2014 by CISA Publisher, Italy THE ENVIRONMENTAL PERFORMANCE OF PLASMA GASIFICATION WITHIN THE FRAMEWORK OF ENHANCED LANDFILL MINING: A LIFE CYCLE ASSESSMENT STUDY M. DANTHUREBANDARA*, I. VANDERREYDT**, K. VAN ACKER* * Department of Materials Engineering, KU Leuven, 3001 Heverlee, Belgium ** Sustainable Materials Management Unit VITO NV, 2400 MOL, Belgium SUMMARY: Landfills can be regarded as potential reservoirs of resources. Massive amounts of important materials such as metals, fines that can be used as construction materials and potential waste fuels are accumulated in landfills. The traditional landfill mining which is used with limited number of objectives has been evolved to the novel Enhanced Landfill Mining (ELFM) concept with a new perspective of extracting valuable material and energy resources from landfills and finally regaining the land. This paper presents the results of an environmental evaluation on plasma gasification, one of the viable candidates for the valorisation of refuse derived fuel (RDF) obtained in the context of ELFM. The study is based on life cycle assessment (LCA). A comparative LCA is performed to explore the environmental profiles of plasma gasification for different scenarios. Moreover, plasma gasification is benchmarked against conventional incineration, a commonly used thermal treatment method in waste processing. The study reveals that the process yields significant impacts on climate change, human toxicity, particulate matter formation, metal depletion and fossil depletion impact categories. Flue gas emission, oxygen usage and disposal of residues of the process (plasmastone) are responsible for the major environmental burdens while electricity production and metal recovery cause major benefits. Reductions and improvements of burdens and benefits can be seen when the plasmastone is valorised in building materials instead of landfilling. The study implies that the overall environmental performance of plasma gasification is a few times better than that of incineration not only for the scenarios with plasmastone valorisation but also for the basic scenario with landfilling of plasmastone. The results of this study proves that plasma gasification is a viable candidate to achieve the goals of ELFM from an environmental point of view.