Sustainability evaluation of the use of cargo-trams for mixed municipal waste transport in Prague

摘要

The use of trams for the transport of waste from urban areas to waste incineration facilities - does it make sense, would it be technically feasible, economically sustainable and environmentally beneficial? These are the questions which we attempted to answer in this comprehensive study. The analysis is performed for a specific potential implementation of this system in Prague and adjacent municipalities. In this work, we compare the current state, where mixed municipal waste is transported to an incineration plant directly by garbage trucks, with variants if mixed municipal waste were taken to transfer stations and from there transported over a longer distance in a large volume by means of tram or truck. Our results show that use of trams results in an overall cost level of €16.41 per ton of waste transported, which represents a slight saving against the existing system at a cost of €17.19 per ton. From the purely economic perspective, however, this does not compete with transportation by truck at €12.28 per ton -above all due to high initial investment into new cargo trams. From the environmental viewpoint, deploying trams brings benefits largely on the local level, where emissions would be reduced by about 50% against the current state. In the global view, assessed through the Life Cycle Assessment method, it appears however only to transfer emissions to the point of energy production, and from this perspective the use of trams is beneficial only if linked with a notable shift from fossil fuel energy to nuclear or renewable sources.