Environment and economic feasibility of municipal solid waste central sorting strategy: a case study in Beijing

Abstract

The Green House program reduced the amount of waste by 34%.

The Green House is now running with a monthly loss of 1982 CNY.

Involve government, expand scale, use professional technology are main suggestions.

Improved program can reduce the amount of waste by 37% (33.8 tons monthly).

Improved program can flip the loss into a profit worth 35034 CNY monthly.

Although Beijing has carried out municipal solid waste (MSW) source separation since 1996, it has largely been ineffective. In 2012, a “Green House” program was established as a new attempt for central sorting. In this study, the authors used material flow analysis (MFA) and cost benefit analysis (CBA) methods to investigate Green House’s environment and economic feasibility. Results showed that the program did have significant environmental benefits on waste reduction, which reduced the amount of waste by 34%. If the Green House program is implemented in a residential community with wet waste ratio of 66%, the proportion of waste reduction can reach 37%. However, the Green House is now running with a monthly loss of 1982 CNY. This is mainly because most of its benefits come from waste reduction (i.e., 5878 CNY per month), which does not turn a monetary benefit, but is instead distributed to the whole of society as positive environmental externalities. Lack of government involvement, small program scale, and technical/managerial deficiency are three main barriers of the Green House. We, thus, make three recommendations: involve government authority and financial support, expand the program scale to separate 91.4 tons of waste every month, and use more professional equipment/technologies. If the Green House program can successfully adopt these suggestions, 33.8 tons of waste can be reduced monthly, and it would be able to flip the loss into a profit worth 35034 CNY.

Graphical abstract

Keywords

Environment and economic feasibility / Municipal solid waste (MSW) / Waste central sorting / Green House

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41201104), the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (No. 2652014013), and the Volvo Group in a research project of the Research Center for Green Economy and Sustainable Development, Tsinghua University (No. 20153000181). The authors would like to acknowledge Xiaoshan Huang for his invaluable assistance with this study.

Funding

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

2016 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg