engleski

Socio-Economic Effects of Circular Economy and Corresponding Changes in the Waste Management System Structure

Due to the fast development, EU economy has grown over its own raw material production. To enable future economic development without increasing imports, EU is trying to make its economy more sustainable and resource efficient. This path is emphasised through the idea of „Closing the Loop“ which is integrated into EU legislation by a Circular Economy Package and emphasizes avoidance of waste production and its recovery. New waste management goals require significant changes in the waste management system structure. This introduces potential new problems and one of them is an increase in the cost for the system for its users (citizens). To assess the impact of these changes, time-dependent LCA based waste, material, and energy flow tracking framework is adapted and used to calculate material and energy production which can be monetised on the material and energy markets. As waste management plants/facilities are built with public money, to provide public service, economic calculations are done in the way that annual cash flow of the system is equalized with zero, taking into account all incomes (incomes from products like energy vectors, secondary materials, and compost) and expenses (like investment and operating costs) of such a system. From these calculations, variable (volatile, time-dependent) and average system gate fee (operating cost per tonne of input waste) is calculated which is charged to the system users. Possible increase of system cost can cause the issue of social unacceptance, which decision-makers, elected by the citizens, want to avoid. Results show that energy recovery of waste generates higher income then material recovery while overall lower system costs, and lower volatility of the system cost, is observed in the material recovery based scenarios. The lowest system costs are calculated for the scenario which combines material and energy recovery (via anaerobic digestion) and avoids investments in final disposal/recovery facilities by outsourcing it (refuse-derived fuel incineration in the cement kiln). The main problem with outsourcing the final disposal/recovery stage is the uncertainty of the cost of such service. It is found that this kind of approach has not been previously used for the assessment of the economic sustainability of the whole waste management systems and represents a good tool for decision makers.

Socio-economic analysis ; Legislation changes ; Waste management system ; Energy recovery ; Material recovery

nije evidentirano