Search results for "Solid Waste"

Evaluating and prioritizing municipal solid waste management-related factors in Romania using fuzzy AHP and TOPSIS

2020

Integrated Methods for Establishing the Sustainability of Urban Policies: Applying Ecological Footprint to the Municipal Solid Waste Management

2018

The Ecological Footprint (EF) method is applied here to assess alternative policies regarding the Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) management. This approach arises from two considerations. First, the MSW management certainly requires a great attention by politicians and technicians, due to its importance for effectively administrating and environmentally controlling urban contexts. On the other hand, the EF method, thanks to its holistic structure of analysis, supposedly provides a synthetic and effective measure of the sustainability of waste management systems, so allowing public administrations to prioritizing policies aimed at implementing environmental actions. Here the EF method is used fo…

Trace element behavior in the fluidized bed gasification of solid recovered fuels

2013

Gasification of biomass and recycled fuels is of particular interest for the efficient production of power and heat. Trace elements present as impurities in the product gas should be removed very efficiently. The objective of this work has been to develop and test thermodynamic models for the reactions of trace elements with chlorine and sulfur in the gasification processes of recycled fuels. In particular, the chemical reactions of trace elements with main thermochemical conversion products, main ash components, and bed and sorbent material are implemented into the model. The possibilities of gas cleaning devices in condensing and removing the trace element compounds are studied by establi…

Improved route planning and scheduling of waste collection and transport

2006

The collection of waste is a highly visible and important municipal service that involves large expenditures. Waste collection problems are, however, one of the most difficult operational problems to solve. This paper describes the optimization of vehicle routes and schedules for collecting municipal solid waste in Eastern Finland. The solutions are generated by a recently developed guided variable neighborhood thresholding metaheuristic that is adapted to solve real-life waste collection problems. Several implementation approaches to speed up the method and cut down the memory usage are discussed. A case study on the waste collection in two regions of Eastern Finland demonstrates that sign…

A multi-objective approach to solid waste management

2010

The issue addressed in this paper consists in the localization and dimensioning of transfer stations, which constitute a necessary intermediate level in the logistic chain of the solid waste stream, from municipalities to the incinerator. Contextually, the determination of the number and type of vehicles involved is carried out in an integrated optimization approach. The model considers both initial investment and operative costs related to transportation and transfer stations. Two conflicting objectives are evaluated, the minimization of total cost and the minimization of environmental impact, measured by pollution. The design of the integrated waste management system is hence approached i…

Landfill Culture: Some Implications to Degrowth

2016

To some extent, waste is just one more sign of the unsustainability of growth. Waste from industrial and socio-economic metabolism must be understood as any unusable material left over after a job, function or operation has been completed, which however, retains the ability to disrupt natural systems and interfere with them as one of its inherent properties. As part of such waste, Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) represents the unusable (or underused) and rejected fraction of the material resources mobilized by the sophisticated urban and/or industrial ecosystem. Although the volume of MSW is relatively small compared to other waste types, it is increasingly important as a result of its steady r…

Municipal Solid Waste Management in the Accra Metropolitan Area, Ghana

2003

Municipal solid waste management in Accra, Ghana, is at present delivered in an unsustainable manner. Due to uncontrolled urbanisation, large quantities of waste are generated daily in Accra, and this exerts much pressure on an over strained solid waste management system. Coupled with weak institutional capacity, and lack of resources, both human and capital, the city authorities face difficulties in ensuring that all the waste generated in the city is collected for disposal. Home collection of waste is limited to high and, some middle income areas while the poor are left to contend with the problem on their own. This leads to indiscriminate disposal of waste in surface drains, canals and s…

Modelling hydrolysis: Simultaneous versus sequential biodegradation of the hydrolysable fractions

2018

Hydrolysis is considered the limiting step during solid waste anaerobic digestion (including co-digestion of sludge and biosolids). Mechanisms of hydrolysis are mechanistically not well understood with detrimental impact on model predictive capability. The common approach to multiple substrates is to consider simultaneous degradation of the substrates. This may not have the capacity to separate the different kinetics. Sequential degradation of substrates is theoretically supported by microbial capacity and the composite nature of substrates (bioaccessibility concept). However, this has not been experimentally assessed. Sequential chemical fractionation has been successfully used to define i…

Environmental assessment of the Sibiu County, Romania: proposal for sewage sludge and OFMSW management

2017

The aim of the work is to assess current solid waste management (SWM) and wastewater treatment (WWT) in the county of Sibiu, Romania. Sibiu is a region where industrialization and tourism are spreading constantly, while pollution monitoring and the introduction of circular economy (CE) principles are still lacking. The environmental issues are mostly due to the absence of reliable sanitation systems, in particular for what concerns sewage sludge treatment. Moreover, Organic fraction from selective collection of municipal solid waste is still missing, since it is disposed of directly to landfill, increasing environmental pollution and contributing considerably to global warming. As a result,…

Evaluation of potential biogas production in Sicily

2012

The aim of the present work is to predict the Sicilian potential biogas production, using the below unmarketable raw materials. The statistical data about OFMSW, the number of animals bred on medium and large farms and the amounts of by-products of food processing industries have been evaluated, in order to compute the potential biogas production and energy in the nine provinces of Sicily. In Sicily (Italy) 5.05 million inhabitants (2012), living in nine provinces, could produce 0.8 million tons of the Organic Fraction of Municipal Solid Waste (OFMSW) per year. At present only 0.07 million tons (3.17 % ca. of MSW) are actually treated (2010). This fraction would be one of the raw materials …