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Sewage Management: Sources, Effects, and Treatment Technologies
Published in Krishna Kumar, Gaurav Saini, Duc Manh Nguyen, Narendra Kumar, Rachna Shah, Smart Cities, 2022
The incineration process requires the high-temperature combustion of solid wastes until they are reduced to ash. When destroying solid wastes, incinerators are designed in such a manner that they don’t produce a lot of heat. Waste-to-energy plants are incinerators which recycle heat energy using a furnace and boiler. Since they need specialized machinery and controls, highly trained technical staff, and auxiliary fuel tanks, waste-to-energy technologies are much more costly to set up and maintain than standard incinerators. Individuals, counties, and even institutions may use this form of waste disposal. The advantage of this approach is that it decreases the amount of waste by up to 20% or 30% of the initial volume. Burning waste decreases the amount of waste material substantially. It is an effective approach to eliminate scavenging in the situation of the dumps.
Municipal solid waste-fueled plants
Published in Anoop Kumar Shukla, Onkar Singh, Meeta Sharma, Rakesh Kumar Phanden, J. Paulo Davim, Hybrid Power Cycle Arrangements for Lower Emissions, 2022
Ahmad Arabkoohsar, Amirmohammad Behzadi
According to the latest energy reports, the average global energy consumption has doubled compared to 2010 and has hit a record high (Behzadi, Arabkoohsar, & Perić 2021). This trend will undoubtedly continue because of population growth and increase in the quality of life, and this will have a significant direct and indirect influence on the energy demand (Khan et al. 2021). An increase in the global rate of greenhouse gas emissions and fossil fuel depletion are catastrophic results of increased energy demand. These concerns must be addressed to hinder the economic problems and climate changes in the coming year. The replacement of fossil fuels by renewable energies is the central solution for policymakers and scientists to deal with global warming and meet the unprecedented energy demand growth (Vojdani, Fakhari, & Ahmadi 2021). Of all renewable fuels, the biogenic portion of municipal solid waste (MSW) as an abundant, carbon-neutral, and controllable resource is a favorable option to make a big step toward the world’s green transition. In this regard, most countries have applied waste-to-energy plants to convert the waste into precious energy and reduce the need for landfilling. Efficient renewable integration and flue gas condensation process are other energy improvement and cost mitigation solutions to cope with the worldwide energy problem. The organic Rankine cycle (ORC) is a promising power generation technology to exploit the waste heat of a low-temperature heat source like flue gas because of low maintenance cost and reliability (Hussain, Sharma, & Shukla 2021).
Landfill life and the many lives of landfills
Published in Zsuzsa Gille, Josh Lepawsky, The Routledge Handbook of Waste Studies, 2021
The old argument that landfills might improve waste-land is clearly no longer valid—if ever it was—given the mixed materials, including large volumes of plastic, that everyday waste streams are composed of these days. Landfilling has been portrayed as almost criminally wasteful, and has been penalized through fiscal measures such as the EU landfill tax. Alternatives to landfill include the reduction of waste generated, re-use, recycling, anaerobic digestion (AD), and waste-to-energy technologies. While many aspire to reduce waste at an individual level, moves in the direction of a more circular economy have been slow. Despite vociferous anti-plastic campaigns, for instance, global plastic waste generation is still expected to grow by at least 50% over the next 20 years (Lebreton and Andrady 2019). Recycling is dependent on there being a local market for materials, which have to compete with virgin resources and whose recovery is often costly and requires subsidy (MacBride 2011). Local re-use movements might be laudable, but they are yet to make much of an impact on reducing global waste flows. AD is increasingly popular but can only deal with organic waste. This leaves Waste-to-Energy plants as the only competing technique that can accept most waste, as landfills do, but with the benefit of being able to produce electricity. The 20th-century struggle between landfill and incineration is set to be replayed in the 21st, with each method boasting of improvements in technique, capacity, contamination control, and cost.
Design and qualification of a bench-scale model for municipal waste-to-energy combustion
Published in Journal of the Air & Waste Management Association, 2022
Robert J. Giraud, Philip H. Taylor, R. Bertrum Diemer, Chin-Pao Huang
In practice, full-scale waste-to-energy plants have the following components: waste supply, thermal conversion, gas-phase combustion, energy recovery, air pollution control, and management of ash and other residues (Leckner 2015). An additional plant component is gas monitoring for process control and compliance with emission standards on pollutants such as CO (Kedrowski and Chromec 2013). Thermal conversion and gas-phase combustion dominate the chemical transformations. MSW is thermally converted to gases and vapors via pyrolysis and gasification in the first stage, and then the gas is combusted in the second stage. Figure 1 conceptually illustrates the main components of a waste-to-energy plant in a block flow diagram.
Effect of modified diatomaceous earth on the heavy metal volatilization characteristics of aged refuse co-combustion
Published in Energy Sources, Part A: Recovery, Utilization, and Environmental Effects, 2023
Siqi Wang, Yuting Tang, Yanhui Bin, Jiehong Tang, Fulong Weng, Xiaoqian Ma
Due to low waste classification levels, the waste composition varies yearly and by place (RONG et al. 2017), leading to differences in heavy metals content. Heavy metals not only have terrible impacts on human health but also harm ecology (LIU et al. 2021), making controlling their emissions a key environmental concern for waste-to-energy plants. Bottom ash constitutes 80% of incineration residue (WANG et al. 2016), making the use of sorbents to sequester heavy metal into bottom ash is a viable control approach.