Advanced aspects of thermal treatment of solid wastes: From a flue gas to a fuel gas technology?

摘要

The management of solid wastes has greatly changed in recent years, shifting from oversimplified procedures, such as collection of unsorted wastes and their disposal in landfills, to integrated and sustainable systems, which have an adequate balance between waste reduction practices, material recycling techniques, biological and thermal processes for energy recovery, and engineered landfill disposal. According to a recent European Community Directive, a sustainable waste management should be defined and developed with the following criteria: (i) to minimize use of landfills and en sure that no landfilled waste is biologically active or contains mo tile hazardous substances. The diversion of materials from landfills is a crucial criterion due to the continuously reducing space for locating sanitary landfills in the European Union and worldwide; (ii) to minimize operations that entail excessive consumption of raw materials and energy without yielding a real overall environ mental advantage; (iii) to maximize the recovery of materials, al beit in respect of the principles laid down in the previous point; and (iv) to maximize energy recovery, given that, in a life-cycle approach, energy recovery from waste allows decreasing consump tion of fossil fuels and overall emissions from all energy conversion systems (Rechberger and Scholler, 2006).