Industrial waste management planning using a Material Flow Analysis (MFA) approach, case study: Nazarabad industrial estate, Alborz province, Iran

Development of an integrated industrial solid waste management plan, taking into account economic and environmental aspects, can help to optimal use of resources. The goal of this paper is to evaluate the existing solid waste management system in Nazarabad Industrial Estate and to propose scenarios to enhance the current waste management system. After waste quantity and composition determined, new scenarios were defined and each scenario was compared using an approach based on MFA. Proposed waste management scenarios were:1: collection of waste and transfer to a material recovery facility. 2: collection of waste and disposal of waste in landfill. Considering a 5-year time frame for waste management, the MFA and uncertainty analysis was implemented in STAN software. In the next step, using results obtained from MFA, environmental burdens of each scenario was calculated using life cycle assessment method. The results of this study revealed that, except for acid gas emission impact category, scenario one will result in lower environmental impacts. It is conjectured that the RDF process incorporated into scenario one may resulted in higher acid gas emissions. A preliminary economic analysis also showed that the capital cost of implementing scenario one is higher but the revenue from the sale of RDF will return back the capital cost within 5 years. Due to an increase of public opposition to the sitting of new landfills, the cost of current waste management, which relied totally on landfilling of waste, will even increase significantly in the future. Therefore, we propose to implement scenario one in order to move towards a more sustainable way of waste management in this industrial city.