Treatment markets are a specific type of market activities that provide the services of treating or disposing of wastes and by-products from other activities. Unlike conventional markets that operate on products with positive value, treatment markets operate on negative determining products, meaning that the products being treated have negative value and require payment for their disposal or treatment rather than generating revenue.
In Life Cycle Assessment modelling, treatment markets play a role in representing the waste management and disposal activities that form part of a product system. They function as intermediary activities that collect and distribute treatment services, much like conventional market activities collect and distribute products with positive value. However, the fundamental difference lies in the direction of value exchange: producers pay for treatment services rather than receiving payment for product delivery.
These markets aggregate treatment capacity from various treatment activities and provide a consumption mix of treatment services to activities that generate materials requiring treatment or disposal. The treatment market ensures that wastes and by-products are properly handled within the system boundaries of an LCA study, accounting for the environmental impacts associated with their treatment or final disposal.
Treatment activities themselves can range from recycling and recovery operations to incineration and landfilling, depending on the nature of the material requiring treatment. By modelling these activities through treatment markets, LCA practitioners can accurately represent the consequential effects of waste generation and the associated treatment burdens in a product system.
The concept of negative determining products is essential to understanding treatment markets. When a product has negative value, an increase in demand for that product (i.e., more waste requiring treatment) will affect the production volume of the treatment activities, making these wastes and by-products "determining" in the sense that they drive the scale of treatment operations.
