Calculation of power, energy and heat in different technologies of municipal solid waste treatment with recycling - Case study: Tehran

With increasing population, economic development and urbanization, waste production has grown rapidly, especially in developing countries. Due to the increasing rate of waste generation, high costs of waste, including collection, transportation, disposal, incineration, along with other heavy costs such as construction and maintenance of a waste treatment technology are imposed on the government and city managers. In this regard, knowing the energy and heat produced and consumed in different treatment technologies away from costly and lengthy laboratory methods can help city managers in making the right decision to be able to use different waste treatment technologies with all their dimensions in the shortest possible time. In this study, power, energy, heat production and consumption of total waste (for gasification technologies, incineration and anaerobic digestion) are calculated by recycling. Power and energy production of total waste in Tehran for combustion processes, 35.102 MW and 1312.88 kWh per ton, for anaerobic digestion process, 69.66 MW and 83.290 kWh per ton for gasification process, 130/58 MW and 1717/44 kWh per ton respectively. Also, at all stages, the potential amount of recycled materials is calculated for each recyclable waste component. Finally, it can be concluded that the energy produced by one ton of waste per day in the processes of incineration, anaerobic digestion and gasification is equivalent to the energy of 14 months and 12 days, 3 months and 18 days and 19 months and 6 days, respectively, which is used for home lighting. It should be noted that the uncertainty of the parameters used on the modeling results has also been investigated.