Modeling and Assessing Economical Feasibilities for Waste to Energy Conversion/Incineration Process in Context of Municipal Solid Waste

Abstract

At the time of the study, most of the municipal waste, including solid municipal waste, in the city of St. Petersburg and in the connected larger Leningrad region is processed by landfilling. This sort of waste processing in open landfills causes environmental damage, uncontrollable landfill fires, bad and dangerous odors, nearby rivers/streams, groundwater pollution, CH₄ and CO₂ emissions, to mention a few. Additionally, landfilling is a waste of energy and material resources present in the content dumped into landfills. In this context, Waste-to-Energy (WtE) incineration is a process that we use to recover the energy the materials have back to usable form, which we use in the form of heat and electricity. Even though a lot of resources and energy are available in the (municipal solid) waste, it does not mean that recovering it would always make sense. Our study analyses and estimates the profitability of a WtE incineration plant(s) in the city of St. Petersburg and the connected Leningrad region. With the available data and following analysis, we have concluded that the WtE incineration is economically feasible in this specific region and city areas, given that the implementations follow more traditional (economically less expensive and easier) technical and process model solutions. As a note of results stability, it needs to be pointed out that the changes in estimates of gate fees, cost of electricity and heat, and so on do impact the economic feasibility a lot, and larger scale changes in the assumed revenues would have a high impact on the outcome of repeatability of the results.Keywords: Municipal solid waste; Waste to energy; Landfill; Feasibility analysis; Energy modeling; WtE assessment; Circularity; Waste reduction; Waste separation; Economical feasibility; Society 2.0; Sustainability

Author Contributions

Conceptualization, T.K. and A.H.; Methodology, T.V., T.K. and P.A.; Software, A.H.; Validation, T.K. and P.A.; Formal Analysis, T.V.; Investigation, T.P. and T.K.; Resources, T.K. and A.H.; Data Curation, T.V.; Writing—Original Draft Preparation, T.V.; Writing—Review & Editing, T.K. and A.H.; Visualization, T.V.; Supervision, T.K. and A.H.; Project Administration, A.H.; Funding Acquisition, A.H.

Ethics Statement

Not applicable.

Informed Consent Statement

Not applicable.

Data Availability Statement

Not applicable.

Funding

Authors would like to thank the European Neighborhood instrument Cross-border Cooperation (ENI CBC) funded AWARE project under Grant KS1913, for supporting this work. LUT International collaboration project for supporting finalization of the work.

Declaration of Competing Interest

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

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