Integrated regional waste management to minimise the environmental footprints in circular economy transition

Abstract

The building of new waste treatment plants has not been closely following the Circular Economy (CE) hierarchy, and the incurred cost and social acceptance have been challenging. Integrated regional waste management by waste trading can offer the sharing of resources to achieve a mutually beneficial system in CE transition. This study aims to minimise the environmental footprints, with the consideration of economic feasibility, in integrated regional waste management by developing an extended Pinch Analysis-based targeting method. The proposed graphical decision-support method is applied to a case study where the waste trading amongst Central Europe (Austria, the Czech Republic, Germany, Poland, and Slovakia) is considered. A monthly waste trading network is identified with Germany, and Austria serves as the country with a surplus of waste treatment capacity. The pessimistic estimation indicated that the GHG emission of the waste trading design is 0.311 t CO2eq/t of waste, where the GHG emission of 1 t waste is reduced by 20 kg – 30 kg compared to the baseline scenario. The assessment suggested that when the amount of waste to be transported by lorry is >5 t and the transport distance to the incineration plant compared to the landfill is less than ~500 – 940 km, waste trading for recovery offers a lower net GHG emission. However, to prevent pollution haven and to consider the economic feasibility, the landfill fees have to be increased significantly. The developed method can identify integrated waste management network for different levels of administrative division to minimise environmental footprints.