Assessment of MSW management strategies for mid-sized metropolitan areas for developing countries

• Ano de defesa: 2023
• Autor(a) principal: Ramalho, José Carlos Martins
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Tipo de acesso: Acesso aberto
• Idioma: por
• Instituição de defesa: Universidade Federal do Espírito Santo; BR; Doutorado em Engenharia Ambiental; Centro Tecnológico; UFES; Programa de Pós-Graduação em Engenharia Ambiental
• Palavras-chave em Português: Gestão de resíduos sólidos urbanos; Avaliação de ciclo de vida; Análise econômica; Veículos de coleta a biometano; Inclusão de catadores; subject.br-rjbn; Engenharia Sanitária
• Link de acesso: http://repositorio.ufes.br/handle/10/17006

This goal of this thesis was to conduct an environmental and economic analysis of different MSW management strategies proposed for the municipalities of Great Vitória Metropolitan Region, in Espírito Santo State, Brazil. Even though the situation in this region is overall better than in the rest of the country, because the dumps were replaced by licensed landfills, the proposed diversion targets by the Brazilian Solid Waste Plan are a long way from being met. For that reason, the proposed technological road maps included options for biowaste treatments, namely open and closed composting, anaerobic digestion with energy recovery and biomethane production, and recycling. As for commingled waste disposal, incineration with energy recovery was put against landfilling. So, the first part of the study focused on the use of biomethane from anaerobic digestion by waste collection and transport vehicles compared to the current diesel counterparts. The results shown that using biomethane is a much better option, with about one tenth of environmental impacts of diesel. Conversely, both the second and third chapters analyzed the entire waste management system from an environmental and economic perspective, respectively. Overall, to abide the most ambitious diversion targets ensures the best results from both perspectives, i.e., to recycle and treat the biowaste as much as possible. As for the ways to achieve this, anaerobic digestion with biomethane production has the best environmental performance, even though it is more costly. However, if a social project instead of a profit-oriented one is foreseen, the service cost for the citizens increases only so slightly. The scenarios with incineration were penalized for their performance in toxicity impact categories, but were better than landfills regarding climate change. Additionally, the high investment costs may push investors away from incineration, since the current landfills are recent and one has energy recovery. Nonetheless, the service fees can actually decrease with incineration, again if no profit is sought in the investments. Finally, the focus of management should follow the waste hierarchy instead being sent directly to final disposal, because the fraction of biowaste represents half of the total municipal solid waste in the studies area, and recycling creates opportunities for including pickers in the materials recovery facilities.