Epsilon Archive for Student Projects

Abstract

In France, recycling bins have been adopted in almost all the cities only in the late 90s. In spite of being already present in the most part of the European capitals, they were adopted in Paris only in 2001. Since 2000, the country has, however, made substantial progress in the separate collection of the following materials i) plastic, cardboard, metals, paper ii) glass and iii) residual waste. Given the general concern about climate change, sustainable development and global warming, the European Union has, in order to deal with these issues, produced several directives. These also include prescriptions and targets concerning the management of waste. In spite of the progresses made, current figures show, however, that France would be unlikely to reach the target set for the municipal waste recycling rate. The development of the biological treatment channel has been one of the solutions recommended by the European Union.
The aim of this thesis is to investigate and compare the different biological treatments that a municipality could implement in order to recover biodegradable waste. The comparative costanalysis of two different technologies is proposed. The technologies considered are anaerobic
digestion and mechanical-biological treatment. The analysis is developed taking a net present value approach and running, in order to account for risk, Monte Carlo simulations on the net present values calculated for the base scenario. The analysis considers 4 potential scenarios
where, apart from comparing the two technologies above, I check also for potential economies of scale. This is done allowing for the adoption of each of those technologies by
two municipalities rather than only one (base case scenario).
The results of the cost-analysis revealed that anaerobic digestion, when adopted at a larger scale, is likely the most cost-effective technology. Narrowing the scope, I observe that, in general, anaerobic digestion, irrespective of the scale, is as cost competitive as it is a facility
using a mechanical-biological treatment with a small capacity. To stress the solidity of my results, I have done a sensitivity analysis, which provides useful information for ranking different projects under uncertainties. Based on my model, I found that the results obtained by the cost-analysis were confirmed with the sensitivity analysis. This means that allowing certain parameters varying do not change the results of my cost-analysis and the conclusions
are still valid.