Energy recovery from waste incineration: economic aspects

If we consider the desirability of reducing fossil fuel consumption, together with the increasing production of combustible solid wastes, there is clearly a need for waste treatment systems which achieve both volume reduction and energy recovery. Direct incineration method is one such system. The aim of this work was to analyze the municipal solid waste incineration situated in the Province of Turin (Piedmont, North Italy), especially its economical effects in consequence of the energy recovery that can be achieved. In order to perform this analysis, two kinds of energy recovery have been studied: electric energy (electrical configuration) only, and both electric and thermal energy (cogenerative configuration). So after a reconstruction of the economic situation, by considering all the costs and revenues, for both the possible energetic configurations the correspondence between the environmental convenience (that was evaluated in a previously work) and the economic convenience has been defined. The main obtained results highlight that currently the environmental convenience corresponds to the cogenerative configuration; instead the economical convenience in the actual condition corresponds to the only electric configuration. Anyway, by working on the thermal energy price, it is possible to obtain at the same time an environmental and economic convenience.