Evaluation of the Sustainability of Industrial Waste Treatment and Valorization (Evaluatie van de duurzaamheid van industriële afvalverwerking en -valorisatie)

Current European legislation has lead to an increased awareness of the benefits that can be achieved by a sound waste policy. This doctoral thesis focuses on the evaluation of industrial waste treatment and valorization. For certain complex waste streams it is, besides technical considerations, also required to conduct an in depth study to select the optimal treatment strategy. The European waste directive puts forward the use of life cycle thinking to sustain such selection.In a first part, specific attention is given to different aspects of thermal treatment with energy recovery, as this treatment option is particularly interesting for complex, contaminated industrial waste streams. Firstly, shortcomings in currently applied emission inventories of energy recovery processes were pointed out. As recent and reliable transfer coefficients werelacking, transfer coefficients based on real scale data and extensive literature search were listed. To quantify fuel related NOx, dioxin and furan emissions, a thorough investigation of their underlying formation mechanisms was performed. Secondly, the problems that can be encountered when applying an environmental impact assessment to energy recovery processes, were investigated. It was found that the modeling approach as well as certainmethodological choices can substantially influence the conclusions of an assessment. It is thus important to clearly elucidate the way of assessing and to critically evaluate all methodological choices when applying an environmental impact assessment to industrial waste treatment processes.In a second part, the scope of this doctoral thesis is further expanded, examining also other treatment options for industrial waste streams (i.e. recycling and landfilling) and evaluating them with regard to their sustainability, instead of only the environmental impact. A sustainability assessment method for the evaluation of different industrial waste treatment processes was proposed and discussed in depth. Its applicability was clearly shown and it was found that all dimensions of sustainability were well covered.In all the aspects studied in this doctoral thesis, specific attention is given to automotive shredder residue or ASR. European legislation has identified this waste stream as critical and various treatment options have been proposed as possible alternatives to current landfill practice. A review was conducted to situate ASR within the context of end-of-life vehicles and to provide a broad overview of all possible treatment processes. It was concluded thatcurrently available techniques can enable to meet the European ELV reuse and recycling/recovery-targets. When applying the proposed sustainability assessment method to different ASR treatment strategies, it was found that recycling combined with energy recovery is the most sustainable treatment strategy, landfilling the least.

Publication year:2012

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