Emergy Assessment of Incineration and Landfilling of Municipal Solid Waste in Italy

Waste management is an important issue to solve as the assimilative capacity of the biosphere becomes overloaded by human needs and activities. According to European guidelines, reduction of waste generation and recovery of energy and materials are strongly recommended for environmentally sound waste management. In order to adopt a long-term sustainable strategy, it is necessary to assess the validity of ways for extracting new “utility” from wastes, such as electricity. We applied the emergy analysis approach to evaluate an incinerator and a managed landfill located in the center of Italy. We compared the electrical energy efficiency (in terms of emergy units) and the environmental impact of power production from municipal solid waste (MSW) for these two approaches to assess their sustainability. Incineration and landfilling require almost the same emergy investment per ton of waste (1.27x1014 and 1.47x1014 sej/t-MSW/yr, respectively). Electrical energy recovery from incineration is more efficient than landfilling (4.76x109 and 2.49x1010 sej/t-MSW/yr per MWh, respectively). These results suggest that incineration can provide more electrical power for the same amount of MSW emergy input.