Materials balance for municipal solid-waste management

A spreadsheet model MSWFLOW was developed as an accounting procedure for determining impacts of management decisions on the physical scale and productive outputs of a municipal solid-waste system. The model tracks the disposition of 50 different waste products and includes source reduction, recovery (recycling and composting), waste-to-energy (WTE) combustion, and landfilling. Outputs from the calculations include mass and volume of waste generated, collected, and diverted by source reduction or recovery; physical scale (daily mass and/or volume) of the recovery and combustion facilities; landfilled mass and associated volume requirement; potential (maximum) annual landfill gas production; and net electrical power production from the combustion facility. The spreadsheet was demonstrated by evaluations of several alternative management strategies for municipal solid waste from a typical U.S. city with a population of 100,000.