Abstract
Metals have toxicity property leading to adverse effect on human health and become scarce resource. If metals in end-of-life goods (wastes) are controlled or treated inadequately, they will eventually result in high environmental risk on human health and ecosystem and valuable resource loss. Treatment and recycling process of solid waste is last stage in goods' life cycle and also critical stage to determine whether heavy metals are released to the environment or not. This study aimed to estimate metal flow in solid waste management system and to evaluate quantitatively environmental burden. By integrating output values in each process, metal content in composition of household waste was estimated. For most metals except Cr, total contribution rate of paper/textile/plastics, bulky waste, and incombustible waste is over 80%. Approximately 40% of Cr originated from plastic packaging. Several SWM scenarios showed that the leaching potential of metals to the environment was quite small and most metals were transferred to the landfill.
