Ecology Report Sample: The Management of Solid Waste

Issue 3

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Waste is often produced in every organization, small and middle sized businesses, schools, hospitals and even the larger corporations that recycle these wastes (Vaughn, 2009). The management of solid waste has significantly changed with the raising environmental concern. Allocation models for waste management usually include mass balance, capacity limitation, financial constraints and operation constraints. However, siting of essential facilities such as incinerators, landfills and transfer points still encounters an explicit limitation that is why as a waste management company (WMC), you need to understand the requirements of the client and design a unique containment, collection and licensed disposal of their business waste(Singh and Ramanathan, 2010). The transfer station is the most important point as a result of various types of incoming and outgoing trucks used to dispose of waste in a metropolitan region. Due to the rapid urbanization, was generation has significantly increased causing a serious threat to human and the environment (Lemann, 2008). Dangerous waste has been discharged together with the household waste in open landfills and in many instances stored in inappropriate conditions resulting to high risk of environmental damage.

The development of a new disposal area is essential since the initial feasibility study compiled suggests the development, screening, and evaluation of alternatives for waste disposal including off-site disposal options. Based on the information given that identifies the need to add waste disposal capacity to Energy Recovery Facility (ERF) and a preliminary facility design, the following recommendations can be made:

Continue making plans for additional on-site disposal capacity for low-level radioactive and hazardous waste, and continue with the ongoing efforts to minimize the need for additional on-site capacity.

This recommendation includes a limited site-specific hydrogeologic characterization data acquired for the proposed facility location. Efforts to minimize the need for an additional on-site capacity including cover design to allow for an extended waste disposal capacity at the new facility. Energy Recovery Facility (ERF) landfill waste acceptance criteria need to be examined further for possible modification to allow a wider variety of waste to be disposed of thereby providing some relief concerning the required capacity for future (Morrissey and Browne, 2004). Furthermore, a hierarchy for dispositioning waste at the facility is necessary to help prepare a feedstock.

Ensure that Energy Recovery Facility (ERF) have sufficient capacity to accommodate all appropriate future generated waste.

Planning for the facility needs to incorporate all projected appropriate future remedies for waste. This should include an additional 25% capacity as a contingency to provide for fluctuations in volume projections.

Ensure the proposed disposal is plotted to operate safely and prevent migration of contaminants into the surrounding soil, air and underground water.

There is a need to include various steps to ensure necessary protectiveness. In the planning stage, preliminary acceptance for a conceptual facility can be determined based on health risk assessment that highlights on the contaminant migration to the adjacent soil, air and underground water based on design features that include site conditions. Later in the process, the low-level disposal facility design can undergo additional modeling and third party review to demonstrate compliance with Department of Energy. Before starting operations, the entire modeling( performance assessment and other requirements) need to give an analysis of how it will protect the environment and human under likely and unlikely scenarios to ensure performance objective designed to protect the environment and human are met as intended(Giusti, 2009).

Locate the facility near the existing waste burial grounds, if precisely feasible, in a way that the contaminated areas are consolidated on the Energy Recovery Facility (ERF).

Location of the Energy Recovery Facility (ERF) closer to the existing operating and the legacy waste burials will be prudent since it will consolidate the areas for purposes of long-term stewardship and provide low cost in relation to the needed infrastructure and maintain the existing greenfield for future use (Chang and Wang, 2005). The technical feasibility needs to be confirmed through current and planned characterization efforts before it is designed.

Ensure a trust fund for a long-term stewardship is formed for the facility.

The establishment of the facility includes the expense of trust fund for long-term stewardship of on-site disposal in the life-cycle estimate. Continuation of the fund in the planning and the final implementation of on-site disposal are contingent upon the condition of accepting the agreement (Wilson, Velis and Cheeseman, 2006). Irrespective of the decision, Energy Recovery Facility (ERF) will be responsible for long-term stewardship either through the establishment of trust funds with the state or independently.

There is a need to increase the residual waste to over 275,000 tonnes to have a larger waste treatment attached to the facility and generate more energy.

Increasing the quantity of residual waste in the energy production will have a significant effect on the environment which includes landfill diversion of up to 96% of waste delivered to ERF and production of more than 27MW of electricity. This will reduce the cost of production at the facility since there will be no cost incurred in electricity production.

A context diagram how waste might be brought in and managed through the facility

Issue 4

Heat Plan and thermal efficiency are often decided in the planning and design phase of a project, but there exist changes that can be made in the project to reduce the heating and cooling bills. Optimum design can minimize potential heating and cooling requirements since space heating is the main expense for various organizations (Tchobanoglous, Theisen, and Vigil, 2009). For a building project, for instance, increasing fabric thermal efficiency can have a significant effect on the bottom line.

Scottish Environment Protection Agency (SEPA) is an organization that permits thermal treatment of waste facilities. At the planning stage, there is a need to ensure goods and waste materials are continually cycled to support the long-term growth of the economy and that waste is progressively designed out. There is a need to achieve 70% reuse and recycling of all waste produced (Guilong et al., 2010). A remarkable journey towards achieving this is to introduce regulations that separate collection of major recyclables such as metal, paper, glass and food substances. When such regulations are implemented, there will be maximum quantity and quality of materials brought to the market after recycling and a reduced fraction. Furthermore, the separately collected recyclables can be banned being deposited directly to the landfills or taken to ERF. However, residual waste is expected to resist after some time even with the increased levels of recycling. For this reason, SEPA needs to find ways of moving the management up the waste hierarchy and introduce a ban on landfills. This is expected to create timescale for action and incorporation of new technologies. An alternative to the landfill is a thermal treatment to produce heat and electricity.

Zero Waste (a circular framework of resource use)

Many businesses will benefit from purchasing heat from the local network or selling heat to other businesses and acquiring valuable additional income. There is a mission to have a largely decarbonized heat sector with significant progress (Feng, 2004). This can only be accomplished through a number of means including renewables and carbon capture but should be based on the fundamentals of keeping the demand minimum. Efficient utilization of energy and recovering like "waste" heat requires minimum cost from the consumers. There is a need to set further actions on energy efficiency, consumer information and intensive heat mapping to complement and add weight to procedures introduced in ensuring efficiency such as renewable heat initiative.

The recovery of natural energy in the waste processed through thermal treatment facility offers various benefits in addressing different issues such as climate change, resource efficiency and also energy efficiency (Karagiannidis, 2012). There is a need to highlight in the planning process how the energy will be utilized efficiently since the high energy efficiencies can be easily achieved where energy is recovered as electricity and heat. Recommendations to heat plan and thermal efficiency should also be taken to include other energy generation means like biogas production for export to the national gas grid system. Additionally, the heat plan needs to be updated to reflect new information that can influence later implementation and use. This is because, during the planning process, some information can only be seen before the implementation begins. For this reason, applicants need to make a conscious effort to ensure heat plan is completed as far as practicable, utilizing best information available like estimates and heat uptake forecasts.

The implementation period of heat plan and thermal efficiency is normally between five to seven years, with the period starting on cessation of commissioning of a facility (Leppo and Valtcheva-Mcgee, 2009). Applicants are therefore expected to give projections on the annual progress target values. The progress needs to be tailored to independent schemes in question and at the same time avoid placing all the heat use in future plans. Thermal regulations need to focus on the new buildings and must have primary energy consumption below a threshold of 50 kWhep/m2/year on average for the regulatory uses. The requirement can, however, be adjustment based on the geographical location, altitude, surface area and building use. Building utilizing wood-energy and low carbon emission network benefits from the adjustment of the primary consumption threshold. Furthermore, to ensure strengthened implementation of the new regulation, properties can undertake a feasibility study on energy supply before applying for the building permit.

There is also need to a task force which includes a wide range of stakeholders to chart a system for how the organization can meet the set goals in regards to energy conservation. The task force can rely on the experiences gained from the efforts along with the dealers of fuel and other industry efforts to recommend a series of policies and legislative recommendations. The implementation of the system will help improve loopholes in the waste management system and ensure that the system continues evolving with waste generation and advancement in technology (Bergh, 2006). During the same process, there is a need to undertake continuous review of the system to allow further adjustment of waste management program to suit the needs of the waste system users and provide invaluable information about the system usage. Information obtained can further help accurate assessment of the system performance and highlight the areas of potential improvement and ensure optimum thermal efficiency and implementation of heat plan.

References

Bergh, J. C. V. D. (2006). Handbook of environmental and resource economics. Cheltenham, Edward Elgar Pub.

Chang, N.B. and Wang, S.F. (2005). A locational model for the site selection of solid waste management facilities with traffic congestion constraints. Civil Engineering Systems, 11(4), pp.287-306.

Cheng, S., Chan, C.W. and Huang, G.H. (2003). An integrated multi-criteria decision analysis and inexact mixed integer...