| 1. |
- Einhaeupl, Paul, et al.
(author)
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Eliciting stakeholder needs - An anticipatory approach assessing enhanced landfill mining
- 2019
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In: Waste Management. - : PERGAMON-ELSEVIER SCIENCE LTD. - 0956-053X .- 1879-2456. ; 98, s. 113-125
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Landfill owners, governmental institutions, technology providers, academia and local communities are important stakeholders involved in Enhanced Landfill Mining (ELFM). This concept of excavating and processing historical waste streams to higher added values can be seen as a continuation of traditional landfill mining (LFM) and seems to be an innovative and promising idea for potential environmental and societal benefits. However, ELFMs profitability is still under debate, and environmental as well as societal impacts have to be further investigated. This study provides a first step towards an anticipatory approach, assessing ELFM through stakeholder integration. In the study, semi-structured interviews were conducted with various stakeholders, involved in a case study in Flanders, Belgium. Participants were selected across a quadruple helix (QH) framework, i.e. industrial, governmental, scientific, and local community actors. The research comprises 13 interviews conducted with an aim to elicit stakeholder needs for ELFM implementation using a general inductive approach. In total 18 different stakeholder needs were identified. The paper explains how the stakeholder needs refer to the different dimensions of sustainability, which groups of stakeholders they primarily affect, and what types of uncertainty could be influenced by their implementation. The stakeholder needs are structured into societal, environmental, regulatory and techno-economic needs. Results show additional economic, environmental, and societal aspects of ELFM to be integrated into ELFM research, as well as a need for the dynamic modeling of impacts. (C) 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
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| 2. |
- Einhaupl, Paul, et al.
(author)
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DEVELOPING STAKEHOLDER ARCHETYPES FOR ENHANCED LANDFILL MINING
- 2019
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In: DETRITUS. - : CISA PUBLISHER. - 2611-4127 .- 2611-4135. ; 8, s. 109-124
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Understanding the perspectives of different stakeholders on emerging technological concepts is an important step towards their implementation. Enhanced Landfill Mining (ELFM) is one of these emerging concepts. It aims at valorizing past waste streams to higher added values in a sustainable manner. Yet, assessment of ELFM mainly focusses on environmental and private economic issues, and societal impacts are rarely analyzed. This study uses semi-structured interviews to build understanding for different ELFM practitioners and researchers and develops five stakeholder archetypes for ELFM implementation: the Engaged Citizen, the Entrepreneur, the Technology Enthusiast, the Visionary and the Skeptic. The archetypes outline major differences in approaching ELFM implementation. The stakeholder perceptions are put into context with existing literature, and implications for ELFM implementation and future research are discussed. Results show that differences in regulatory changes and technology choices are affected by different stakeholder perspectives and more research is needed to balance inner- and inter-dimensional conflicts of ELFMs sustainability. The developed archetypes can especially be helpful when evaluating social impacts, whose perception often depends on opinion and is difficult to quantify.
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| 3. |
- Esguerra, John Laurence, 1991-, et al.
(author)
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The economic and environmental performance of a landfill mining project from the viewpoint of an industrial landfill owner
- 2018
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In: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Enhanced Landfill Mining, 5-6 February, 2018, Mechelen, Belgium. - Leuven, Belgium : University of Leuven. - 9789082825909 ; , s. 389-396
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- The EU Commission’s circular economy strategy pushes for a higher recycling rate and a more long-term waste management practice.1 Enhanced Landfill Mining (ELFM) can contribute to this agenda as a better landfill management option, by shifting the landfill paradigm from dumping or as end-storage of waste to resource recovery or as temporary storage of resources.2-4 Through ELFM, landfills becomes a secondary source of both material (Waste-to-Material, WtM) and energy (Waste-to-Energy, WtE) with the use of innovative technologies.3,4Several studies explored the environmental and/or economic aspects of ELFM having different scopes and objectives. Some cover the entire process value chain while others additionally focused on comparing technological choices for WtE,5–7 WtM,8,9 and even ELFM waste valorisation.10 Furthermore, for the economic assessment, regulation-related costs and benefits as landfill taxes, gate fees and green certificates5,11,12 are also accounted for. Regarding the identification of economic hotspots, many of these studies concluded similar processes to be important. However, most of these studies were based on either hypothetical cases, or real cases but with small-scale excavation and separation using non-sophisticated set-ups, which are not likely to be used for large-scale processing. Hence, more uncertainty is expected from the lack of actual ELFM demonstration projects.The aim of this study is to analyse the main contributing factors that influence environmental and economic performance of ELFM, considering the landfill owner’s viewpoint. The study is based on a real case of excavation and subsequent separation in an existing stationary facility. Specifically, the influence of the prevailing system conditions is investigated as defined by the current legislation and the market situation.
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| 4. |
- Hernández Parrodi, Juan Carlos, et al.
(author)
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Integration of resource recovery into current waste management through (enhanced) landfill mining
- 2019
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In: Detritus. - : Eurowaste SRL. - 2611-4135 .- 2611-4127. ; 08, s. 141-156
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Europe has somewhere between 150,000 and 500,000 landfill sites, with an estimated 90% of them being “non-sanitary” landfills, predating the EU Landfill Directive of1999/31/EC. These older landfills tend to be filled with municipal solid waste andoften lack any environmental protection technology. “Doing nothing”, state-of-theart aftercare or remediating them depends largely on technical, societal and economic conditions which vary between countries. Beside “doing nothing” and landfill aftercare, there are different scenarios in landfill mining, from re-landfilling thewaste into “sanitary landfills” to seizing the opportunity for a combined resource-recovery and remediation strategy. This review article addresses present and futureissues and potential opportunities for landfill mining as an embedded strategy incurrent waste management systems through a multi-disciplinary approach. In particular, three general landfill mining strategies are addressed with varying extentsof resource recovery. These are discussed in relation to the main targets of landfill mining: (i) reduction of the landfill volume (technical), (ii) reduction of risks andimpacts (environmental) and (iii) increase in resource recovery and overall profitability (economic). Geophysical methods could be used to determine the characteristics of the landfilled waste and subsurface structures without the need of aninvasive exploration, which could greatly reduce exploration costs and time, aswell as be useful to develop a procedure to either discard or select the most appropriate sites for (E)LFM. Material and energy recovery from landfilled waste canbe achieved through mechanical processing coupled with thermochemical valorization technologies and residues upcycling techniques. Gasification could enablethe upcycling of residues after thermal treatment into a new range of eco-friendlyconstruction materials based on inorganic polymers and glass-ceramics. The multi-criteria assessment is directly influenced by waste- and technology related factors, which together with site-specific conditions, market and regulatory aspects,influence the environmental, economic and societal impacts of (E)LFM projects.
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| 5. |
- Krook, Joakim, 1977-, et al.
(author)
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How to evaluate (enhanced) landfill mining : A critical review of recent environmental and economic assessments
- 2018
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In: Proceedings of the 4th International Symposium on Enhanced Landfill Mining, 2018. - Leuven : KU Leuven. - 9789082825909 ; , s. 317-332
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Conference paper (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Landfill mining has been proclaimed as an alternative strategy to address unwanted impacts of waste deposits. In real-life projects, such excavation and processing of deposited waste has mainly been used to facilitate traditional objectives such as remediation, land reclamation or creation of landfill airspace. A key target of recent landfill mining research is, however, to go beyond this type of local motives and enhance the recovery of materials and energy resources by developing advanced processing technologies. Although such an ambitiousapproach clearly displays a wider societal potential, it also adds complexity to the implementation and assessment of pros and cons of landfill mining.
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| 6. |
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| 7. |
- Sauve, Giovanna, et al.
(author)
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Integrated early-stage environmental and economic assessment of emerging technologies and its applicability to the case of plasma gasification
- 2023
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In: Journal of Cleaner Production. - : Elsevier. - 0959-6526 .- 1879-1786. ; 382
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Journal article (peer-reviewed)abstract
- Economic and environmental impact assessments are increasingly being adopted in the design and implementation of emerging systems. However, their emerging nature leads to several assessment challenges that need to be addressed to ensure the validity and usefulness of results in understanding their potential performance and supporting their development. There is the need to (i) account for spatial and temporal variability to allow a broader perspective at an early stage of development; (ii) handle uncertainties to systematically identify the critical factors and their interrelations that drive the results; (iii) integrate environmental and economic results to support sound decision-making based on two sustainability aspects. To address these assessment challenges, this study presents an alternative approach with the following corresponding features: (i) multiple scenario development to conduct an exploratory assessment of the systems under varying conditions and settings, (ii) global sensitivity analysis to identify the main critical factors and their interrelations, and (iii) trade-off and eco-efficiency analysis to integrate the economic and environmental results. The integrated approach is applied to a case study on plasma gasification for solid waste management. The results of the study highlight how the approach allows the identification of the dynamic relations between project settings and surrounding conditions. For example, the choice of gasifying agent largely depends on the background energy system, which dictates the impacts of the process energy requirement and the savings from the substituted energy of the syngas output. Based on these findings, the usefulness and validity of the proposed integrated approach are discussed in terms of how the key assessment challenges are addressed and how it can provide guidance for the development of emerging systems.
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| 8. |
- Esguerra, John Laurence, 1991-, et al.
(author)
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Assessing the economic potential of landfill mining : Review and recommendations
- 2019
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In: DETRITUS. - : CISA PUBLISHER. - 2611-4127 .- 2611-4135. ; 8, s. 125-140
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Research review (peer-reviewed)abstract
- As landfill mining (LFM) gains public attention, systematic assessment of its economic potential is deemed necessary. The aim of this review is to critically analyze the usefulness and validity of previous economic assessments of LFM. Following the life cycle costing (LCC) framework, (i) the employed methods based on goal and scope, technical parameters and data inventory, and modelling choices were contrasted with respect to (ii) the synthesized main findings based on net profitability and economic performance drivers. Results showed that the selected studies (n=15) are mostly case study-specific and concluded that LFM has a weak economic potential, hinting at the importance of favorable market and regulation settings. However, several method issues are apparent as costs and revenues are accounted at different levels of aggregation, scope and scale-from process to sub-process level, from private to societal economics, and from laboratory to pilot-scale, respectively. Moreover, despite the inherent large uncertainties, more than half of the studies did not perform any uncertainty or sensitivity analyses posing validity issues. Consequently, this also limits the usefulness of results as individual case studies and as a collective, towards a generic understanding of LFM economics. Irrespective of case study-specific or generic aims, this review recommends that future assessments should be learning-oriented. That is, uncovering granular information about what builds up the net profitability of LFM, to be able to systematically determine promising paths for the development of cost-efficient projects.
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| 9. |
- Esguerra, John Laurence, 1991-
(author)
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Developing strategies for improved economic performance and reduced climate impact of landfill mining in Europe
- 2021
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Doctoral thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Landfill mining refers to the re-circulation of resources from the previously deposited wastes. It is an alternative approach for managing landfills that integrates resource recovery with site remediation. Several resources that can be recovered in landfills include scrap metals for recycling, combustibles for energy recovery, and inert materials for construction applications. In addition, land can be recovered for alternative uses, or landfill void space can be liberated for the deposition of future wastes. At present, landfill mining is still an emerging concept with few project implementations. Consequently, the assessments of its economic and climate implications are case study-specific, limiting the understanding of its potential in a wider geographical scope. This thesis aims to assess the economic performance and climate impact of landfill mining in Europe towards the development of sound strategies for implementation. Different project setups are assessed in relation to varying factors at the site level such as waste composition and landfill settings, and at the system level such as policy and market conditions and background material and energy. In doing so, a factor-based method is developed and applied to generate multiple scenarios (531, 441 scenarios per project setup) and determine the underlying important factors and their interrelations that drive the results. Such understanding is used to develop and discuss strategies for improvement by addressing relevant questions for specific stakeholders, including project investors (i.e., which landfill sites to prioritize?), landfill mining practitioners (i.e., how to set up such projects?), and policymakers (i.e., which policy instruments can effectively support such projects?). Results show that landfill mining is preferable in terms of climate than economy. In general, about 50% of the scenarios are climate beneficial, while only about 20% of the scenarios are profitable. Possible economic and climate improvements are shown by employing internal thermal treatment of combustibles and extending fines residue utilization as construction aggregates. However, these require overarching conditions such that the choice of project setup must be in line with the selection of landfills for mining. Preferable site and system-level conditions are identified in general but it is also discussed that the plausibility of finding such conditions may be difficult at present. This steers the development of more tailored strategies on what can be done now by the landfill practitioners in terms of setting up projects under current policy and market conditions in specific regions, or what can be done by the policymakers in terms of implementing various policy instruments that can drive such changes at the system level. In this regard, the future of landfill mining research can be guided towards addressing key challenges and potential solutions for improvement elicited through a generic and learning-oriented assessment. Furthermore, this thesis highlights the role of assessment as a tool for learning and guiding the development of emerging concepts such as landfill mining.
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| 10. |
- Esguerra, John Laurence, 1991-
(author)
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Economics of Landfill Mining : Usefulness and Validity of Different Assessment Approaches
- 2020
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Licentiate thesis (other academic/artistic)abstract
- Landfill mining (LFM) is an alternative strategy to manage landfills that integrates remediation with secondary resource recovery. At present, LFM remains as an emerging concept with a few pilot-scale project implementations, which presents challenges when assessing its economic performance. These challenges include large knowledge deficits about the individual processes along the LFM process chain, lack of know-how in terms of project implementation and economic drivers, and limited applicability of results to specific case studies. Based on how these challenges were addressed, this thesis aims to analyze the usefulness and validity of different economic assessments of LFM towards the provision of better support for decision-making and in-depth learning for the development of cost-efficient projects. Different studies were analyzed including the previous studies through a systematic literature review and the factor-based method that is developed in this thesis. Four categories of economic assessment approaches were derived in terms of the study object that is about either an individual LFM project (case-study specific) or multiple LFM projects in a region (generic); and in terms of the extent of analysis that is about either the identification of the net economic potential (decision-oriented) or extended towards an in-depth learning of what builds up such result (learning-oriented). Across the different approaches, most of the previous studies have questionable usefulness and validity. The unaddressed parametric uncertainties exclude the influence of using inherently uncertain input data due to large knowledge deficits. While the narrowly accounted scenario uncertainties limits the fact that LFM can be done in various ways and settings in terms of site selection, project set-up and regulatory and market conditions. In essence, these uncertainties propagate from case-study specific to generic study object. From decision-oriented to learning-oriented studies, the identification of what builds up the result are unsystematically determined that raises issues on their subsequent recommendations for improvement based on superficially derived economic drivers. The factor-based method, with exploratory scenario development and global sensitivity analysis, is presented as an approach to performing generic and learning-oriented studies. As for general recommendations, applied research is needed to aid large knowledge deficits, methodological rigor is needed to account for uncertainties and systematically identify economic drivers, and learningoriented assessment is needed to facilitate future development of LFM. This thesis highlights the important role of economic assessments, which is not only limited for the assessment of economic potential but also for learning and guiding the development of emerging concepts such as LFM.
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| 11. |
- Esguerra, John Laurence, 1991-, et al.
(author)
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Is enhanced landfill mining profitable?
- 2018
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In: ISWA 2018 Book of Proceedings. ; , s. 240-245
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Conference paper (other academic/artistic)abstract
- The shift from linear to circular economy has steered the change in perception about landfills. From final to temporary waste storage, landfills are considered as technospheric stocks of resources that can be recovered through innovative technologies in the concept of enhanced landfill mining (ELFM). At present, most ELFM projects are in pilot-scale and it remains as a proof of concept. Economic feasibility is one of the primary considerations that must be satisfied prior to its full-scale realization. Several economic assessments were conducted in recent years but there is no systematic synthesis of these studies to date. The aim of this review is to compile various empirical insights of previous economic assessments of ELFM in relation to the employed methodological choices. With pre-defined exclusion criteria, 15 studies were selected in this review. For the empirical part, the identified main economic drivers for costs are separation and sorting, thermal treatment and transportation, while for benefits are material sales, recovered land and energy sales. In more than half of the studies, the costs exceeded the benefits concluding that ELFM is not profitable. The few potentially profitable cases mainly depend on varying the system conditions defined by market prices and regulations. These require changes that are more radical, if not impossible. For the method part, costs and benefits are accounted at different levels of aggregation, scope and scale—that is from process to sub-process level, from private to societal economics, and from laboratory to pilot scale, respectively. As most studies are based on pilot scale, if not purely conceptual, data estimation mainly depends on extrapolation from these pilot projects or on direct adoption of secondary data. In spite of the expected uncertainties in model, scenario and parameter, less than half of the studies employed sensitivity and uncertainty analyses. With it being neglected, their results can be considered to have a weak reliability for practical use in a full-scale ELFM project implementation. A need for systematic framework for early-stage assessment is highlighted to capture both stochastic and epistemic uncertainties. Process and system upscaling with exploratory scenario development, and participatory data collection in ranges rather than in absolute terms are some of the suggested approaches to generate results with a certain level of confidence. In this way, the future economic assessments of ELFM can veer away from simple profitability assessments. Instead, it focuses on knowledge development despite the limited information that is inherent to emerging concepts. Most importantly, it provides reliable information that can be used as a decision-support for various stakeholders such as project managers, technology developers, and policy makers towards the advancement of ELFM.
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