Definition of the Subject and Its Importance
The turnover of materials used in a national economy has been described as the consumption of resources (low-entropy materials ) that are used and transformed into wastes (high entropy materials ); therefore, the economy is viewed as an entropy-producing process [1]. In a recycling economy, entropy generation must be kept low and waste management should transform high-entropy wastes into low-entropy recycled products that can reduce the use of primary resources. Entropy reduction is achieved by the concentrating of materials. Evaluation of the materials balances, by means of statistical entropy analysis, within state-of-the-art incinerators shows that waste-to-energy is a major contributor to a sustainable materials management. It is shown that waste incineration results in significant concentrating of several substances.
Introduction: Material Balances and Entropy Evaluation...
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- Statistical entropy:
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Developed by C.E. Shannon as part of his information theory and used as a measure for distributions in statistics, formally similar to the thermodynamic entropy of mixing.
- Waste-to-energy (WTE):
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Combustion of municipal solid waste (MSW) with energy recovery.
- Material flow analysis (MFA):
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Systematic assessment of the flows and stocks of materials within a system, defined in space and time.
- Statistical entropy analysis (SEA):
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Entropy-based method, based on material flow analysis, for quantifying the concentrating effect of a process or system.
Bibliography
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Directive 2000/76/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 4 December 2000 on the incineration of waste
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Books and Reviews
Brunner PH, Rechberger H (2004) Practical handbook of material flow analysis. Lewis Publishers, New York
Kaufman S, Krishnan N, Known E, Castaldi M, Themelis N, Rechberger H (2008) Examination of the fate of carbon in waste management systems through statistical entropy and life cycle analysis. Environ Sci Technol 42(22):8558–8563
Rechberger H (2001) An entropy based method to evaluate hazardous inorganic substance balances of waste treatment systems. Waste Manage Res 19:186–192
Rechberger H (2001) The use of the statistical entropy to evaluate the utilisation of incinerator ashes for the production of cement. Waste Manage Res 19:262–268
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Rechberger, H. (2013). Waste-to-Energy: Decreasing the Entropy of Solid Wastes and Increasing Metal Recovery. In: Kaltschmitt, M., Themelis, N.J., Bronicki, L.Y., Söder, L., Vega, L.A. (eds) Renewable Energy Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5820-3_418
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