Economic and environmental estimated assessment of power production from municipal solid waste using anaerobic digestion and landfill gas technologies

Waste management has always been one of the main challenges of developing countries. So far, several methods have been proposed to manage municipal solid waste (MSW) and reduce its environmental impact. The purpose of this paper is to determine the amount of MSW generated in two different cities in Asia and to investigate the performance of both landfill gas and anaerobic digestion methods for electric power generation. Both Tehran and Beijing have a high rate of daily waste production and can be a good case study to examine the performance of both energy generations technologies from MSW. However, the use of such technologies requires more and more detailed studies in order to encourage private and government sector investors to use them. In addition, the use of alternative energy sources such as electricity from waste is inevitable due to the current problems in the field of energy. The assessment presented in this paper includes the amount of electricity generated in both technologies, economic feasibility based on Levelized Cost of Energy (LCOE) and Payback Time (PBT) calculations approaches, and environmental evaluation according to the global warming potential (GWP) under different three Scenarios. It was found that after a 20-year period, the amount of waste generated in regions of Beijing is 1.96% lower than in Tehran. The total electricity generated by anaerobic digestion technology is 45.2% and 41.9% higher than that of landfill gas project in Tehran and Beijing, respectively. In addition, on the average MSW management under scenarios 2 and 3 in the Tehran and Beijing could reduce GWP by 79.16 and 92.65%, respectively. The average PBT value for a 20-year period in Tehran is 1.1 and 0.67 years higher than in Beijing under landfill gas and anaerobic digestion technologies, respectively