Focus Session at Venice 2022 - 9th International Symposium on Energy from Biomass and Waste, Venice (IT), 21-23 November 2022:
ROLE OF THERMAL TREATMENT IN CIRCULAR ECONOMY.
Moderator:
- Umberto Arena (IT)
Panellists:
- C. Cord'Homme (FR)
- M. Castaldi (US)
- L. Lombardi (IT)
- M. Materazzi (UK)
- D. Chen (CN)
- J. Yan (CN)
IWGG Task Group Thermal Treatment in collaboration with weTHINK produced the
“Waste Circularity Podcast No. 1: Thermal Treatments for Municipal Solid Waste”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qH9XXFVJEw
Thermal Treatments Task Group Meeting - Venice Symposium – 15/10/2018
Participants:
- Sven Andersson (B&W_Babcock & Wilcox –Se)
- Umberto Arena (Università della Campania Luigi Vanvitelli – Caserta - IT)
- Marek Dudyński (Modern Technologies and Filtration Sp. z o. o. – Warszawa - PL)
- Lidia Lombardi (Università Niccolò Cusano – Roma - IT)
- Massimiliano Materazzi (University College London, London - UK)
- Michael Nelles (University of Rostock, Rostock, - DE)
- Federico Viganò (Politecnico di Milano - IT)
The main discussion was about the future activities of the task group, based on what each member expects from the TG activities.
Main proposals for the near future are:
- To use the TG as possible way to find partners for project proposal.
- To improve the involvement of industrial partners and companies.
- To share, analyze and discuss data from experimental and operating activities.
- To meet at least once per year. There is a proposal to organize a specific meeting (1 or 1.5 days) each year, starting from next spring/summer to strengthen the links among the participants. This meeting could be organized as an IWWG meeting but not necessarily linked to an IWWG conference to avoid high cost of registration. The group could ask a university or a private company to make available a room, and organize an informal meeting without fee as universities.
"Waste-to-Energy: experiences, projects and expectations in the new markets"
During the Venice 2016 6th Symposium on Energy from Biomass and Waste (14 - 17 November 2016) the IWWG TG on Thermal Treatments organized the workshop on "Waste-to-Energy: experiences, projects and expectations in the new markets".
The Thermal Treatment Task Group already oriented in the past its activities in gathering evidences that the Waste-to-Energy treatments give an essential contribution to reaching the goals of technical reliability, environmental sustainability and economic viability in the waste management systems.
Past experiences were manly related to many European Countries and OECD countries, where several plants are successfully in operation, even if in many regions WtE plant capacity is still lacking also because of the local population strong opposition.
However, it is quite evident that WtE plants projects are presently quite few in the traditional west European Countries and the interest is moving towards new markets including the east European Countries and, even more, toward the growing economies as China.
According to this view, the aim of the workshop was to gather experiences, projects and expectations in relation to the above mentioned new markets. To this purpose it is essential to learn from the companies directly involved in those new markets, but also understanding the local rules and, in general, the boundary conditions for the realization of new projects.
Lectures given during the workshop:
- Introductory note: U. Arena (IT), D. Chen (China), L. Lombardi (IT).”Waste-to-Energy: some notes about experiences and perspectives in China”
- D. Corrente, A. Dini, Gruppo HERA – Direzione Ingegneria (IT). ”Hazardous Waste Treatment Facility in Zhejiang Province a Case Study”
- Mingsheng Huang, China Everbright International (China). ”China Everbright International WtE incineration technology”
- S. Calvani, Termomeccanica (IT). ”Innovation and Competence in WtE to improve global efficiency”
- Nobuhiro Tanigaki, NIPPON STEEL & SUMIKIN ENGINEERING CO., LTD. (Japan). “Latest two years operational experience and R&D activities of proven waste gasification technology”
The proposal “Mining the European Anthroposphere” (MINEA) was approved by the COST European framework, which supports transnational cooperation among researchers, engineers and scholars across Europe (http://www.cost.eu). Dr. Ulrich Kral, from the Technical University of Wien, is the main proposer. IWWG and several of its members contributed to support and widespread the proposal and to call for the participation of several researchers as secondary proposers.
The MINEA COST Action lasts for four years and aims to create a network for promoting the discovery of the resource potential in the European anthroposphere. It deals with the exploration, evaluation and exploitation of resources in buildings & networks, landfills and solid residues from solid waste incineration. The MINEA COST Action fosters the complementation and substitution of primary for secondary resources to achieve an optimum of economic benefits at a minimum of environmental impacts. More information is available at http://www.cost.eu/COST_Actions/ca/CA15115.
A national conference was held in Rome on November, 29th 2015, organized by Solvay and hosted by Niccolò Cusano University, about energy recovery from waste. The conference was the occasion to gather different operators in the fields of waste-to-energy and to illustrate the state-of-the-art of the energy recovery from waste. Discussion about new BRefs for Waste Incineration and change in Italian renewable energy subsidy schemes took place. TGTT members gave their contribution to the discussion by their speeches. Presentations (most in Italian) are available for downloading.
Special Thematic Issue: Waste-to-Energy Processes and Technologies
Waste Management (Volume 37, March 2015)
The special issue is made of a series of review papers prepared from academy and industry on fundamental and applied aspects, with aim to describing a faithful state-of-the-art of waste-to-energy processes and technologies. The different contributions provide a synergic framework within which the thermal treatment emerges as a necessary pillar for sustainable waste management, thanks to the high level of environmental protection reached by a continuous technology development. Insights on process aspects and technologies for combustion and gasification are supplied. The constraints and the limits to energy recovery and the best achievable performances are illustrated. Economic aspects of thermal treatment are discussed as well as environmental aspects related to air pollution control systems, ultrafine particle emissions, treatment and recovery of generated solid residues, merits and shortcomings of life cycle assessment studies. Advanced technologies as pyrolysis, co-gasification and innovative solutions in combustion based process are delineated.
Special Thematic Issue: Solid Waste Gasification
Waste Management (Volume 32, April 2012)
TGTT promoted this special issue with the aim of stimulating discussion about the most advanced aspects of gasification processes for thermal treatment of solid wastes. The issue includes papers that cover different kind of relevant matters: up-to-date review of the gasification-based WtE for municipal solid wastes; operating experiences with different types of gasification technology (shaft furnace, fluidized bed, two-stage plasma, downdraft moving bed); energetic performance of combustion and gasification WtE units; effect of some operating parameters; co-gasification option; technical feasibility of gasification process for different types of industrial wastes (sewage sludge; plastic wastes; scrap tires); characterization of solid residues; solid waste gasification modeling. The issue also includes contributions from industrial manufacturers of different types of large-scale municipal and industrial solid waste gasifiers. The analysis of scientific papers in this special issue indicates that gasification could today be proposed as a viable alternative solution for waste treatment with energy recovery, even though it could be premature to indicate it as the sole future thermal processing strategy. The performance data and knowledge from commercial waste gasifiers, together with new advanced solutions for syngas cleaning and conditioning, will allow the scientific community to exhaustively assess the gasification process and to evaluate it as a possible competitor of conventional, moving grate or fluidized bed, direct combustion systems.
Special Thematic Issue: Thermal Treatment of Solid Waste
Waste Management (Volume 30, July 2010)
A first result of the task group’s activity is represented by the Special Issue on Thermal Treatment of Solid Waste. The topics reflect the current focus of research and development in thermal waste treatment as well as requirements in different countries. The first group of articles deals with refuse derived fuels. The production and use of RDF and SRF may represent an environmentally friendly and economic possibility of saving fossil fuels. Combustion processes and incineration technologies are the main topic of the following articles. Gasification and pyrolysis of waste are technologies that will be widely applied in the near future. One paper describes the fluidized bed gasification of different types of waste-derived fuels. Additional papers are also focused on the important theme of pyrolysis. Energy recovery is crucial in ensuring an efficient use of the contained energy of waste. Investigations into energy recovery from waste incineration and WtE plants are also described in the issue. Residues arise from all thermal waste treatment procedures: the characteristics and treatment of these residues, including those of flue gas cleaning is dealt with by a number of papers. Atmospheric pollution control, health issues and environmental burdens of thermal waste treatments are also investigated in several papers. Finally, case studies describe examples of the technological change in thermal waste treatment in different countries.