Regenerative Energie
Waste-to-Energy (WtE) incineration is a crucial part of modern waste management, providing safe waste disposal with electricity and heat production. Future projections show that especially new EU member states, who are trying to catch up with the economic growth, can expect further growth in waste amounts in the coming decades. At the same time, these countries are mostly landfilling their wastes, contributing to worst environmental impacts and green house gas emissions, while EU is encouraging safe waste disposal and the diverting of wastes from landfills. Many are therefore already struggling to live up to the environmental standards of the EU legislation. Among them is also Slovenia, who is paying fines for breaching the Kyoto targets and is facing a failure to reach the waste management targets in the near future. Slovenia knows no direct waste incineration. Instead, it is trying to implement refuse derived fuel incineration and composting as the main treatment options. A further problem is also that for such a small country of only 2 million inhabitants no waste management plans on national level exists; neither the country has a strategy on waste incineration. Instead, municipalities decide on their own about their waste management, leading to a non-transparent system that could result in higher environmental impacts and costs. The goal of this study was to introduce an average modern European Waste-to-Energy incineration model to Slovenia and to determine what kind of environmental impacts it would cause on the national level as well as on the regional level. One of the main motivations was to show whether it is from an environmental perspective better for Slovenia to continue with a 'municipal-sized†level of waste management (regarding WtE), or it is better to 'go big†and create a national strategy, which would implement bigger WtE facilities. By modelling a modern WtE plant, which we could nowadays find in Europe next year if the construction would start recently, in a life cycle assessment software (GaBi4), environmental impacts of waste incineration of such plant could be determined. Scenario with different plant sizes (but same technological efficiencies) revealed the influence of transport and (residues treatment and disposal) infrastructural networks on the environmental impacts of modelled WtE. Weighing the impacts through a landscape character assessment in relation with the regional environmental-impact capacities revealed how a local-oriented WtE solutions (more small-sized WtE plants in different regions) would affect the environment in comparison to a national model (one big plant in Central Slovenia). Results reveal that even though Central Slovenia region is least impacted by WtE in general, the best WtE solution would be to place two middle sized plants - one in the west part of Slovenia and one in the east that would cover approximately the same waste amounts. Second best environmental option was the scenario with the most number of small-sized plants. The highest impacts of waste incineration are coming from flue gas cleaning and are related to dioxins and mercury. Most environmental benefits (credits) are, however, created through electricity production. Understanding which parts of WtE affect the environment mostly and in what way and how sensitive are to those impacts different Slovenian regions could help establish a new national or regional strategies for future WtE implementation in Slovenia.
| Copyright: | © WtERT Germany GmbH |
| Quelle: | Master´s thesis 2010 (September 2010) |
| Seiten: | 99 |
| Preis: | € 10,00 |
| Autor: | M.Sc. Saša Malek |
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