Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
incineration, disposal, treatment and recycling integrated programs, taking into account all
possible economic costs, technical, normative, and environmental issues. Great efforts are
dedicated to the definition of suitable strategies for material recovery and energy production.
The general aim is the one of showing how to build decision models applied to Solid Waste
Management, with different degrees of complexity and different objectives. A multi-objective
procedure is described and applied to a real case study.
Finally, conclusions and future developments about DSS for material recovery and
energy production are reported.
1.1. Sustainable Use of Resources
Waste production is increasing all over the world. Total waste generation in EU is 1300
million tonnes per year. Construction and demolition and manufacturing industries generate
half of total waste, while an important contribution, 14%, is also given by municipal waste. In
addition, there is an evident relation between economic growth and waste generation. This
overall increasing trend goes against the general policy target of waste prevention, and both
policies and strategies are requested to face this problem.
The cornerstones of the EU's strategy to coping with waste (figure 1) are to: prevent
waste in the first place; recycle waste; turn waste into a 'greenhouse neutral' energy source;
optimise the final disposal of waste, including its transport.
Preventing waste requires a deep analysis of waste production processes both as regard
industrial activities and general human habits. This activity is of fundamental importance to
achieve a reduction of waste production, and, in case of industrial activity is often connected
to quality assurance management, for example according to the International Organization for
Standardization (ISO) 14001 and the Eco-Management Audit Scheme (EMAS). Rather than
defining a single general strategy, preventing waste should be specialised for each single
industrial activity, including human living as regards municipal waste. Due to the objective of
the topic, these aspects are not discussed in this chapter and the reader is recommended to
look at (Ville Niutanen, Jouni Korhonen, 2003; Wenk, 2004; Broman, 2000; Del Breo and
Beatriz, 2003; Van Cooten, 2005) for further details.
The fact from which the discussion in this chapter starts is that industrial and human
activities produce waste, that in this specific context is referred to as “gross waste”. One of
the main goals of waste management is to reduce the quantity of “gross waste” to a lower (in
a utopian zero emission world, zero) quantity of waste. This hopefully lower quantity is
hereinafter referred as “net waste”, and it is obtained by transforming part of the “gross
waste” in other products (mainly energy and recovered materials). Specifically, this chapter is
centred on material recovery and energy production, so the last three of the four above
mentioned European Union strategies related to waste management (“greenhouse neutral”
energy production (GNEP), recycling (REC), and optimising final disposal (OFD)) will be
analysed and discussed in detail, and decision processes and systems to support them will be
proposed.
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