BIOMASS FRACTION OF MUNICIPAL SOLID WASTE PETERMINED BY ~(14)C METHOD

摘要

Estimation of CO2 emission from municipal solid waste incineration for greenhouse gas emission inventory in Japan is based on the waste composition of plastics and synthetic textiles. The waste composition is usually determined by manual sorting method in Japan. However, the precision and accuracy of this conventional method is relatively low due to the heterogeneity of waste and the misclassification of waste categories (ex. synthetic textiles and plant textiles). Recently, several researchers have reported the biomass fraction of municipal solid waste determined by ~(14)C method (Bahor et al, 2010, Fellner et al, 2009, Mohn et al., 2008). This method utilizes the relative abundance of ~(14)C to distinguish between the fossil carbon and biomass carbon, which makes it more robust to the misclassification problem than the manual sorting method. The ~(14)C measurement can be applied to solid, liquid and gas samples. Thus, by analyzing gas samples from a waste incineration, the incinerator is effectively used as a high capacity homogenizer to obtain representative samples. So far, only a few studies reported the ~(14)C content by waste categories. The aim of this study is to apply the ~(14)C method to determine the biomass fraction of municipal solid wastes in Japan.