Cost benefit analysis of composting and anaerobic digestion in a community: A review

Abstract

Currently, population and urbanisation are rapidly growing which causes a tremendous amount of municipal solid waste (MSW) being generated. The MSW management in Malaysia can be considered relatively poor and disorganised. The most preferred MSW disposal method in Malaysia is through landfilling. To address this and to respond to increasing global environmental concerns, composting and anaerobic digestion have been hailed as an environmentally and economically friendly alternative besides landfilling. By capturing the organic materials from MSW and putting it to a more beneficial use as feedstock for composting and anaerobic digestion sounds very ideal. Focusing on the waste landfilling prevention for a small community, this paper discusses on whether composting or anaerobic digestion might be a feasible alternative to landfilling. Both solutions differ in various aspects. The purpose of this study is to know whether composting or anaerobic digestion is more beneficial by performing cost benefit analysis on both situations. In this study we estimated the cost benefit analysis of three different scenarios. First scenario is the baseline for the current practice of solid waste management where the wastes are dumped to landfill. Second scenario is the installation of composting plant and the third scenario will be estimated on the installation of anaerobic digester.