The effect of environmental indicators on the waste treatment scenarios ranking
2015
Milutinović, Biljana (College of Applied Technical Sciences, Niš (Serbia)) | Stefanović, Gordana (College of Applied Technical Sciences, Niš (Serbia)) | Vučković, Goran (College of Applied Technical Sciences, Niš (Serbia)) | Tomić, Mladen (College of Applied Technical Sciences, Niš (Serbia)) | Đekić, Petar (College of Applied Technical Sciences, Niš (Serbia))
The selection of an appropriate waste treatment scenario is a complex problem in which a set of environmental, economic, and social criteria must be taken into account. Different waste treatment scenarios have different effects on the environment, which is expressed through a variety of environmental indicators. The main problem is to determine the indicators that clearly and fully express the most important influential factors. This paper presents a number of different environmental indicators and their influence on the waste treatment scenarios ranking. The study is carried out on the example of waste management in the city of Ni?. Four scenarios are developed: the business as a usual scenario (meaning the landfilling of waste) and the three other scenarios with energy recovery and preservation of resources including composting organic waste with recycling inorganic waste, incineration of waste, and anaerobic digestion of waste. Four experiments were conducted in order to assess the influence of environmental indicators: the first experiment was done using four indicators, the second by using seven indicators, the third experiment by using nine indicators, and the fourth experiment by twelve indicators. The ranking of each scenario was performed on the basis of a multi-criteria analysis, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP method). The obtained results have shown that the increasing number of environmental indicators has led to a change in the ranking of scenarios in terms of their impact on the environment. Namely, it is necessary to increase the number of environmental indicators to a number which will be sufficient to carry out the relevant waste treatment scenario ranking in terms of the impact on the environment.
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