Multi-criteria analysis of strategies towards sustainable recycling of phosphorus from sewage sludge in Austria.

To promote optimal phosphorus (P) recovery from municipal wastewater and sewage sludge with viable legal instruments, it is imperative to understand the regional and national consequences of different legal requirements for recycling. In this study we develop a scenario-based analysis to assess the environmental and economic impact of different national P recovery strategies in the context of a detailed representation of the existing Austrian wastewater infrastructure. This assessment combines material flow analysis, life cycle assessment and life cycle costing and includes the indicators P recycling rate, P utilization degree, heavy metal removal rate, share of heavy metals' content in wastewater redirected to agricultural soils, global warming potential, cumulated energy demand, terrestrial acidification potential, volume of freight transport and annual costs.

Systematic data-driven exploration of Austrian wastewater and sludge treatment - implications for phosphorus governance, costs and environment.

Within the new policy framework shaped by the EU Green Deal and the Circular Economy Action Plans, the field of wastewater and sludge treatment in Europe is subject to high expectations and new challenges related to mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions, micropollutant removal and resource recovery. With respect to phosphorus recovery, several technologies and processes have been thoroughly investigated. Nevertheless, a systemic and detailed understanding of the existing infrastructure and of the related environmental and economic implications is missing.

Assessing China's potential for reducing primary copper demand and associated environmental impacts in the context of energy transition and "Zero waste" policies.

To conserve resources and enhance the environmental performance, China has launched the "Zero waste" concept, focused on reutilization of solid waste and recovery of materials, including copper. Although several studies have assessed the copper demand and recycling, there is a lack of understanding on how different waste management options would potentially reduce primary copper demand and associated environmental impacts in China in the context of energy transition. This study addresses this gap in view of a transition to low-carbon energy system and the optimization of copper waste management combining MFA and LCA approaches.

Data description of "building age map, Vienna, around 1920".

Building age maps inventory the construction dates of buildings. While many cities routinely map the construction dates of present building stocks, building age maps of the distant past are mostly not available. An exception is the building age map of Vienna around 1920.

Phosphorus stocks and flows in an intensive livestock dominated food system.

Current use and management of phosphorus (P) in our food systems is considered unsustainable and considerable improvements in the efficiency of P use are required to mitigate the environmental impact of poor P stewardship. The inherent low P use efficiency of food production from animals means food systems dominated by livestock agriculture can pose unique challenges for improving P management. This paper presents the results of a substance flow analysis for P in the Northern Ireland (NI) food system for the year 2017 as a case study for examining P stewardship in a livestock dominated agricultural system.

Implementing the dimension of quality into the conventional quantitative definition of recycling rates.

With the proposed Circular Economy Package, the European Union is striving to play a leading role in the implementation of recycling goals. The significantly increased recycling targets are just some of the defined objectives. However, to assess the Member States' attainment of the new recycling targets, the European Union still builds on a purely quantitative recycling rate assessment procedure that neglects to include qualitative recycling aspects.

A new thermoanalytical method for the quantification of microplastics in industrial wastewater.

Plastics are crucial for our modern lifestyle and yet pose a major threat to our environment. Rising levels of microplastics (MP) in rivers and oceans are a big challenge for our economy and regulatory institutions as well as from a scientific point of view. Smaller microplastic particles, in particular, are especially hard to identify and even harder to quantify in environmental samples.

Filling two needs with one deed: Potentials to simultaneously improve phosphorus and nitrogen management in Austria as an example for coupled resource management systems.

The tremendous increase in resource consumption over the past century and the environmental challenges it entails has spurred discussions for a shift from a linear to a circular resource use. However, to date most resource studies are restricted to one material or a single sector or process. In this work, a coupled material flow analysis taking the national phosphorus (P) and nitrogen (N) system of Austria as an example for two closely connected resource systems is conducted.

Assessing the Reliability of Material Flow Analysis Results: The Cases of Rhenium, Gallium, and Germanium in the United States Economy.

Decision-makers traditionally expect "hard facts" from scientific inquiry, an expectation that the results of material flow analyses (MFAs) can hardly meet. MFA limitations are attributable to incompleteness of flowcharts, limited data quality, and model assumptions. Moreover, MFA results are, for the most part, based less on empirical observation but rather on social knowledge construction processes.

Added Values of Time Series in Material Flow Analysis: The Austrian Phosphorus Budget from 1990 to 2011.

Material flow analysis is a tool that is increasingly used as a foundation for resource management and environmental protection. This tool is primarily applied in a static manner to individual years, ignoring the impact of time on the material budgets. In this study, a detailed multiyear model of the Austrian phosphorus budget covering the period 1990-2011 was built to investigate its behavior over time and test the hypothesis that a multiyear approach can also contribute to the improvement of static budgets.

Determining the amount of waste plastics in the feed of Austrian waste-to-energy facilities.

Although thermal recovery of waste plastics is widely practiced in many European countries, reliable information on the amount of waste plastics in the feed of waste-to-energy plants is rare. In most cases the amount of plastics present in commingled waste, such as municipal solid waste, commercial, or industrial waste, is estimated based on a few waste sorting campaigns, which are of limited significance with regard to the characterisation of plastic flows. In the present study, an alternative approach, the so-called Balance Method, is used to determine the total amount of plastics thermally recovered in Austria's waste incineration facilities in 2014.

Phosphorus recovery from municipal wastewater: An integrated comparative technological, environmental and economic assessment of P recovery technologies.

Phosphorus (P) is an essential and limited resource. Municipal wastewater is a promising source of P via reuse and could be used to replace P derived from phosphate rocks. The agricultural use of sewage sludge is restricted by legislation or is not practiced in several European countries due to environmental risks posed by organic micropollutants and pathogens.

Supporting phosphorus management in Austria: Potential, priorities and limitations.

Protecting water bodies from eutrophication, ensuring long-term food security and shifting to a circular economy represent compelling objectives to phosphorus management strategies. This study determines how and to which extent the management of phosphorus in Austria can be optimized. A detailed national model, obtained for the year 2013 through Material Flow Analysis, represents the reference situation.

Determining national greenhouse gas emissions from waste-to-energy using the Balance Method.

Different directives of the European Union require operators of waste-to-energy (WTE) plants to report the amount of electricity that is produced from biomass in the waste feed, as well as the amount of fossil CO2 emissions generated by the combustion of fossil waste materials. This paper describes the application of the Balance Method for determining the overall amount of fossil and thus climate relevant CO2 emissions from waste incineration in Austria. The results of 10 Austrian WTE plants (annual waste throughput of around 2,300 kt) demonstrate large seasonal variations in the specific fossil CO2 emissions of the plants as well as large differences between the facilities (annual means range from 32±2 to 51±3 kg CO(2,foss)/GJ heating value).

Resource recovery from residual household waste: An application of exergy flow analysis and exergetic life cycle assessment.

Exergy is based on the Second Law of thermodynamics and can be used to express physical and chemical potential and provides a unified measure for resource accounting. In this study, exergy analysis was applied to four residual household waste management scenarios with focus on the achieved resource recovery efficiencies. The calculated exergy efficiencies were used to compare the scenarios and to evaluate the applicability of exergy-based measures for expressing resource quality and for optimizing resource recovery.

Dynamic material flow modeling: an effort to calibrate and validate aluminum stocks and flows in Austria.

A calibrated and validated dynamic material flow model of Austrian aluminum (Al) stocks and flows between 1964 and 2012 was developed. Calibration and extensive plausibility testing was performed to illustrate how the quality of dynamic material flow analysis can be improved on the basis of the consideration of independent bottom-up estimates. According to the model, total Austrian in-use Al stocks reached a level of 360 kg/capita in 2012, with buildings (45%) and transport applications (32%) being the major in-use stocks.

Impact of reduced anthropogenic emissions and century flood on the phosphorus stock, concentrations and loads in the Upper Danube.

Patterns of changes in the concentration of total and soluble reactive phosphorus (TP, SRP) and suspended sediments at different flow levels from 1991 to 2013 in the Austrian Danube are statistically analyzed and related to point and diffuse emissions, as well as to extreme hydrological events. Annual loads are calculated with three methods and their development in time is examined taking into consideration total emissions and hydrological conditions. The reduction of point discharges achieved during the 1990s was well translated into decreasing TP and SRP baseflow concentrations during the same period, but it did not induce any change in the concentrations at higher flow levels nor in the annual transport of TP loads.

Evaluation of resource recovery from waste incineration residues--the case of zinc.

Solid residues generated at European Waste to Energy plants contain altogether about 69,000 t/a of Zn, of which more than 50% accumulates in air pollution control residues, mainly boiler and filter ashes. Intensive research activities aiming at Zn recovery from such residues recently resulted in a technical scale Zn recovery plant at a Swiss waste incinerator. By acidic leaching and subsequent electrolysis this technology (FLUREC) allows generating metallic Zn of purity>99.

Sample preparation and biomass determination of SRF model mixture using cryogenic milling and the adapted balance method.

The biogenic fraction of a simple solid recovered fuel (SRF) mixture (80 wt% printer paper/20 wt% high density polyethylene) is analyzed with the in-house developed adapted balance method (aBM). This fairly new approach is a combination of combustion elemental analysis (CHNS) and a data reconciliation algorithm based on successive linearisation for evaluation of the analysis results. This method shows a great potential as an alternative way to determine the biomass content in SRF.

Waste management in the Irkutsk Region, Siberia, Russia: environmental assessment of current practice focusing on landfilling.

The municipal waste management system of the region of Irkutsk is described and a life cycle assessment (LCA) performed to assess the environmental performance of the system. Annually about 500 000 tons of waste are managed. The waste originates from three sources: household waste (27%), commercial waste (23%) and office & institutional waste (44%).

Waste to energy--key element for sustainable waste management.

Human activities inevitably result in wastes. The higher the material turnover, and the more complex and divers the materials produced, the more challenging it is for waste management to reach the goals of "protection of men and environment" and "resource conservation". Waste incineration, introduced originally for volume reduction and hygienic reasons, went through a long and intense development.

Biogenic carbon in combustible waste: waste composition, variability and measurement uncertainty.

Obtaining accurate data for the contents of biogenic and fossil carbon in thermally-treated waste is essential for determination of the environmental profile of waste technologies. Relations between the variability of waste chemistry and the biogenic and fossil carbon emissions are not well described in the literature. This study addressed the variability of biogenic and fossil carbon in combustible waste received at a municipal solid waste incinerator.

Extended statistical entropy analysis (eSEA) for improving the evaluation of Austrian wastewater treatment plants.

Extended statistical entropy analysis (eSEA) is used to evaluate the nitrogen (N) budgets of 13 Austrian wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs). The eSEA results are then compared to the WWTPs specific N-removal rates. Among the five WWTPs that achieve a removal rate of 75% the eSEA detects significant differences in the N-performance.

Sewage sludge ash to phosphate fertilizer by chlorination and thermal treatment: residence time requirements for heavy metal removal.

Heavy metal removal from sewage sludge ash can be performed by mixing the ash with environmentally compatible chlorides (e.g. CaCl2 or MgCl2) and water, pelletizing the mixture and treating the pellets in a rotary reactor at about 1000 degrees C.

Long term analysis of the biomass content in the feed of a waste-to-energy plant with oxygen-enriched combustion air.

Thermal utilization of municipal solid waste and commercial wastes has become of increasing importance in European waste management. As waste materials are generally composed of fossil and biogenic materials, a part of the energy generated can be considered as renewable and is thus subsidized in some European countries. Analogously, CO(2) emissions of waste incinerators are only partly accounted for in greenhouse gas inventories.