The USEPA has developed and maintained the Waste Reduction Model (WARM), a process-based life cycle assessment (LCA) decision support tool for waste management, since 1998. WARM estimates greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, energy use, labor hours, wages, and taxes associated with the handling of non-hazardous solid waste. WARM covers 61 material categories of what are traditionally considered Municipal Solid Wastes (MSW) and Construction and Demolition Debris (C&D) and 6 waste management pathways: recycling, landfilling, combustion, composting, anaerobic digestion, and source reduction. WARM serves as a solid waste management planning tool that can be used to perform high-level comparisons of the environmental and economic impacts of material-specific waste management decisions. WARM is likely the most widely-used tool for estimating GHGs associated with MSW materials end-of-life management, although official statistics are not kept.

Much of the data and calculations underlying WARM are documented but are not available for public review or use. WARM includes intrinsic estimates of key data inputs to waste management processes that are static (e.g. electricity and transportation intensities of activities and associated emissions factors) and similarly it provides intrinsic models that are used to compute offsets of recovery activities like material production and soil carbon storage that are not based on the most current available models and many do not include full life cycle accounting. USEPA is evaluating ways in which modeling can be improved and made more transparent, data quality can be disclosed, additional impacts can be considered, and how WARM can draw on existing data and models that represent the best data sources that are actively maintained. This effort to restructure WARM to achieve these objectives is referred to as WARMer. The purpose of this special session is to solicit public input on WARMer. This session will begin with a presentation on the technical requirements for WARM and describe potential modifications. The presentation will be followed by an interactive session to gather insights from participants. We will use interactive QR-code based polling, as well as moderated, open discussion to solicit input from participants.

Disclaimer:

The views expressed in this presentation are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the views or policies of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.