Sustainability and Integrated Energy Recovery Scheme for Health Care Waste Management for Megacity Dhaka: Through Material Flow and Life Cycle Assessment

ABSTRACT

A sustainable healthcare waste (HCW) management strategy for Dhaka integrating material flow analysis and comparative life cycle assessment is proposed. The current scenario (SC1), heavily reliant on landfilling, low recycling, and incineration without energy integration, is compared with the proposed alternative scenario (SC2), with higher material recycling, waste‐to‐energy conversion, and heat integration. Using gate‐to‐grave life‐cycle assessment across eighteen ReCiPe 2016 midpoint (H) impact categories, the proposed SC2 outperforms SC1 in ten categories, notably acidification potential by 96%, land‐use potential by 97%, climate change impacts by 78%, and marine eutrophication by 44%, while PM formation potential falls by 20.499 kg PM _2.5 ‐eq and energy resource depletion becomes a net credit through 20572 kWh/day of recovered electricity. However, trade‐offs are observed in the toxicity, eutrophication, and photochemical oxidant formation categories, notably carcinogenic human toxicity (∼3.8x increase), marine ecotoxicity (∼2.3x increase), freshwater eutrophication (∼97% increase), and photochemical oxidant formation potential (∼3x increase). The proposed scheme also supports Bangladesh's drive toward SDG 7 and 13 outright, and toward SDG 3, 6, 11, and 14 once the toxicity and oxidant formation burdens are controlled. Our findings can provide a substantial quantitative framework for improving existing systems to achieve sustainability with a circular economy strategy.