Abstract
Landfilling is still the most common way of municipal waste treatment in around half of the EU countries. It has been shown that diverting some of the waste-to-energy recovery makes it possible to reduce emissions of various pollutants, especially when the waste replaces lower-quality fossil fuels in heating plants. A methodology is presented to determine the influence of a waste-to-energy plant with a processing capacity in the range of 10 to 150 kt/y integrated into an existing district heating system on the air pollution load in the surrounding area. The change in emission production is determined using an optimisation tool previously developed in the GAMS environment. The parameters of the existing heating plant, such as the fuels used, the boiler output range, etc., are considered. A Gaussian scatter model is then used to determine the immission loads of individual pollutants in the surrounding area. Using the methodology, it is possible to directly quantify the impact of waste-to-energy plant integration on the health burden of the surrounding population in comparison with the reference state. This strategy is presented via a case study involving real-world data, in which it turned out that the immission load can be significantly reduced (up to 83%) compared to the original state in the calculation scenario.
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Data availability
The datasets generated during the current study are not publicly available due to the large amount of data and their interpretation but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Abbreviations
- CAQI:
-
Common air quality index (−)
- CHPP:
-
Combined heat-and-power plant
- CU:
-
Cogeneration unit
- DALY:
-
Disability-adjusted life years (y)
- DHS:
-
District heating system
- EIFs:
-
Environmental impact factors
- HTP:
-
Human toxicity potential (1,4-dichlorobenzene equivalents/kg emission)
- i:
-
Number of considered substances
- IL index:
-
Index of immission load (−)
- LCA:
-
Life cycle assessment
- LHV:
-
Lower heating value (MJ/kg)
- li :
-
Immission load index value of the i-th substance (µg/m−3)
- MSW:
-
Municipal solid waste
- ni :
-
Immission concentration of the i-th pollutant (µg/m−3)
- PM10 :
-
Particulate matter of size less than 10 μm diameter
- WtE:
-
Waste-to-energy
- WtEP:
-
Waste-to-energy plant
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Funding
The research was funded by the project Sustainable Process Integration Laboratory – SPIL, funded as project No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/15_003/0000456, by Czech Republic Operational Programme Research and by the Technology Agency of the Czech Republic (TACR) within the research project National Centres of Competence, specifically through the project National Centre for Energy (TN1000007).
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Putna, O., Pavlas, M., Turek, V. et al. Influence of waste-to-energy plant integration on local immission load. Clean Techn Environ Policy 24, 3047–3059 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10098-022-02344-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10098-022-02344-8