Abstract: With the high-speed growth of economic and urbanization development in China, the generation of solid waste increased rapidly in recent years, but the insufficient treatment capacities and illegal transfer/dumping activities of solid waste have resulted in serious resource waste and environmental risk. Assessing the environmental risk forms the basis for solid waste management since it can provide quantitative information to identify the management objective, boundaries, and priorities. Since solid waste has been characterized with complex properties and its flow among different regions is influenced by the regional technology and economy development level, the environmental risk of solid waste presents factor diversification, high spatial heterogeneity, high uncertainties, and long-term. To assess environmental risk of solid waste, most previous studies were conducted by quantitative or semi-quantitative method for specific process, including source term analysis, pollutant exposure calculation, and health risk assessment, while there still lacked a systematic analysis of the whole process. Therefore, this paper proposed a refined framework on assessing whole-process environmental risk of solid waste. The framework mainly included four steps: (1) Describe the life-cycle processes of solid waste, including generation, storage, collection, transportation, treatment, and utilization; (2) Identify the risk factors and their transfer mechanism; (3) Evaluate maximum acceptable levels of environmental risk for different receptors; (4) Quantify the environmental risk based on multiple indicators.