engleski

Impact of Changes in the Waste Management System Structure on the Cost of the System

Due to the fast development of its economy, EU has grown over its own raw material production. To enable future economic development without increasing imports, EU is putting a lot of efforts in making its economy more sustainable and resource efficient. One of the ways to do this is to material circulation within the economy for as long as possible. This idea of „Closing the Loop“ is integrated into European legislation by a Circular Economy Package which emphasizes decrease in (and avoidance of) waste production, and its recovery once its produced. New waste management goals require significant changes in waste management system structure as well as introducing of new technologies. This is introducing new potential problems and one of them is an increase of the system cost which is analysed in this research. To assess the impact of these changes, time dependent LCA based waste, material and energy tracking framework is adapted and used to calculate accurate material and energy flows which can be monetarised on the material and energy markets. As waste management plants/facilities are in most cases 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 payments and operating costs) of such a system. From these calculations, variable (time dependent) and average minimum system gate fee (operating cost per tonne of input waste) is calculated which is charged to the citizens. Due to this, this problem also falls within the domain of social acceptance issues. Results show that systems which put emphasis on material recovery have lower system costs and lower volatility of the system cost over time, compared to the systems which base on energy recovery of waste. Lowest system cost had scenario Optimal recovery which combines material and energy recovery (via anaerobic digestion) and avoids investments in final disposal/recovery facilities by outsourcing it (by 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 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

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