Recycling Scenarios And Impacts Studied: Part 3

For all scenarios, 35% of the heat recovered by waste paper incineration is assumed to be converted into electricity and the rest (65%) to be removed as low-temperature waste heat. Currently, in many European countries fossil-fuel-based district heating may be partially replaced by coproduced heat. However, such possibilities of utilizing the low-temperature heat from waste paper incineration could not be studied in this feasibility study due to the limited resources. Because of their anticipated importance to the overall environmental impacts, they are intended to be studied and taken into account in the planned full-scale study.

The date used for the inventories are basically the same for all scenarios. The majority of the data from the basic production, transportation, energy conversion, and waste-management sectors comes from IIASA's IDEA database. These data were collected between 1990 and 1991 from industrial and official statistical sources and, in practice, represent the current situation in Western Europe. The remaining date have been obtained from the latest available OECD statistics (statistical year 1986), and processing data are from individual industrial sources. Parts of the scenarios, however, involve assumptions that do not correspond to the present technology sphere; the data for these parts of teh scenarios are estimates, but they are still realistic for the needs of the primary objectives of this feasbility study.

For each of the three the following environmental impact indicators were calculated.

• Energy demands: electric power and heat
• Nonrenewable fuel demands: hard coal, brown coal, derived coal, middle distillate, light fuel oil, heavy fuel oil, and natural gas.
• Raw material demands: common raw materials.
• Consumption of primary energy sources: coal seam, crude oil, hydropower, nuclear fuel, crude natural gas, and biomass of trees.
• Air emissions: CH4, SO2, NOx, CO, and CO2.
• Water emissions: total suspended soilds (TSSs), biological oxygen demand (BOD), chemical oxygen demand (COD), and chlorinated organic compounds (AOXs).
• Solid wastes: gross municipal wastes (output from the life cycle) and terminal municipal wastes (in landfills).

One criterion for selecting these indicators was that they are the most commonly referenced factors in the political discussion on environmental impacts. In addition, they are most consistently represented in the IDEA database.