Embodied exergy-based analysis of a municipal solid waste treatment system with uncertainty inclusion

The development of an integrated solid waste management (ISWM) system is still a matter of interest in many countries. One of the main challenges is to efficiently allocate the material streams in order to save energy and recover materials. The aim of this paper is to use the embodied exergy criteria to evaluate the distribution of the material streams into a solid waste (SW) treatment system composed by: a mechanical biological treatment (MBT) plant for refuse derived fuel (RDF) production and a paper recycling plant for cardboard production. Two scenarios are compared, based on the inlet mass flow to the MBT plant and the cardboard production. Stochastic tools based on Monte Carlo simulation are adopted for generating simulation scenarios, in order to account for the uncertainty that occurs in external (e.g., waste composition) and internal (e.g., equipment energy consumption) parameters