Landfill Deconstruction - Resource Potential, Climate Impact and Economic Analysis

Landfilling has always been one of the most important ways of waste disposal. The pollutants in the waste as well as the biological degradation and chemical reactions in the landfill body pose a threat to human health and the environment. However, the landfill contains not only pollutants, but also recyclable materials, which might be utilized. The Umweltbundesamt has conducted a study on landfill deconstruction in Austria, in which the landfilled resource potential was estimated, the climate impact of the recovery of the potential recyclables was analyzed and an economic situation around landfill mining was assessed.

ESTIMATION OF LANDFILLED RESOURCE POTENTIAL
Potential resources, which can be retrieved from landfills, are in principal energy feedstock, metals and minerals. For these three categories 58 waste types (according to Austrian waste code) were selected and the landfilled quantities were estimated for the time period 1990 until 2009. The estimation resulted in a total of approximately 33.8 Million tons of landfilled waste which can be regarded as resource potential for landfill mining.
CLIMATE IMPACT OF THE RECOVERY OF POTENTIAL RECYCLABLES
Landfill mining produces recyclable materials, which - when used as secondary material in products - can reduce the cumulated energy demand (CED) and the life cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emission of these products by replacing more energy intensive primary materials. For three selected landfills the potentials for the reduction of CED and GHG-emissions was estimat-ed for the materials aluminium, copper, iron, waste wood and light weight fraction. Calculations have been made with the help of the GEMIS emission model (Global Emission Model of Integrated Systems). A detailed analysis of the potential for reducing GHG-emissions by landfill mining was conducted for one landfill. The maximum achievable reductions are bigger for GHG-emissions than for CED, because the landfill deconstruction saves GHG-emissions by re-ducing future landfill gas emissions. The highest specific reductions of CED and GHG-emissions are reached by aluminium and copper. For iron the reductions are low, because the re-cycling process accepts only a maximum of 30 % iron scrap due to technical conditions. The to-tal reductions of CED and GHG-emissions are considerable higher for waste wood and the light weight fraction, because the landfill mining produces much higher quantities of these fractions than of above mentioned metals.



Copyright: © Lehrstuhl für Abfallverwertungstechnik und Abfallwirtschaft der Montanuniversität Leoben
Quelle: Depotech 2012 (November 2012)
Seiten: 4
Preis: € 2,00
Autor: Dipl.-Ing. Thomas Weißenbach
 
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