A Review on Solid Waste Management

Mechanical engineering

Solid waste is the useless, unwanted and discarded material resulting from day to day activities in the community. Solid waste management may be defined as the discipline associated with the control of generation, storage, collection, transfer, processing and disposal of solid waste. Municipal Solid Waste (MSW) management is one of the vital issues in the contemporary urban environment, more particularly in developing countries. Municipal Solid Waste generation consists of organic and inorganic waste materials generated by various activities of the society. Improper disposal of solid waste can pollute all vital components of the environment (i.e., air, land and water).Even though land filling of waste is the least favourable option in the waste management hierarchy, the majority of municipal solid waste (MSW) in many countries is still land filled. This represents waste of valuable resources and could lead to higher environmental impacts compared to energy recovered by incineration, even if the landfill gas is recovered. Using life cycle assessment (LCA) as a tool, this paper aims to find out which of the following two options for MSW disposal is more environmentally sustainable incineration or recovery of biogas from landfills, each producing either electricity or co-generating heat and electricity. The systems are compared on a life cycle basis for two functional units: ‘disposal of tonne of MSW’ and ‘generation of 1 kWh of electricity’. The results indicate that, if both systems are credited for their respective recovered energy and recyclable materials, energy from incineration has much lower impacts than from landfill biogas across all impact categories, except for human toxicity.

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