engleski

Sustainability of Energy Recovery of Waste under the Influence of Legislation Changes

One of the leading problems EU is faced with is waste. This problem is even more emphasised in urban areas. Increased population also increases energy consumption. This correlation make energy recovery (ER) of waste logical path towards sustainable development of the cities. At the same time waste represents resource that can alleviate, along with energy problems, material scarcity problem of EU through its material recovery (MR). Because of this EU has introduced waste hierarchy to divert produced waste from landfills to recovery processes. Also, EU set ER of waste to subordinated position to MR which decreases amount of waste for ER. In these circumstances question of sustainability of ER of waste comes in question. The aim of this study is to answer to question of sustainability of ER of waste under the influence of legislation changes. Plan is to show sustainable degree of integration of ER of waste within the legislative framework. Economic sustainability of waste-to-energy (WtE) cogeneration plant as a part of district heating system is conducted. Analysis is based on regression analysis carried over data for existing WtE plants and locally dependent data. Actual waste quantity and composition, socio- economic data and EU legislation framework are used as input for LCA-IWM prognostic model. Forecasted data are used to calculate internal rate of return of analysed scenarios. Scenarios are modelled to analyse combustion of local municipal solid waste alone, co-combustion of other local wastes and waste import from entire region. Environmental sustainability of different waste management systems (WMS) is evaluated through single-score assessment by primary energy return approach. This cumulative energy demand (CED) based approach reduce all external material and energy flows to PE equivalents which can be compared. Individual technology material and energy flows are constructed on the basis of life cycle inventory (LCI) process unit data. This way only internal waste flows that connect individual technologies are tracked through the whole analysed system. As the next step in this study, economic system optimisation using process network synthesis (PNS)is planned. This step is based on previously constructed technology UPR data which have to be expanded with economic data. Expected result of this research is to benchmark sustainability of different scenarios of WMS in different fields (in this part of research in the fields of economy and ecology) and to give aggregated answer to a question of sustainability of integration of ER to WMS within the foreseeable legislation framework.

waste management system ; energy recovery ; material recovery ; waste model ; economic sustainability ; environmental sustainability

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