Book Description

The purpose of this project is to develop an information system that will be useful to municipal solid waste managers as they explore the implications of potential municipal solid waste management policy options in terms of their material use, energy use, waste minimization, and economic consequences over their life-cycles in the municipal solid waste stream. Policy changes (regarding, for instance, mandatory recycled content and standards) are being considered at national, state, and local levels. The public is also currently sensitized to problems with the municipal solid waste management system, and they are all too mindful of the egregious waste management problems associated with past management policies and practices. There also seems to be a specific popular social agenda that may not be founded in careful technical and economic analyses, but in social perception. Complicating matters is the fact that different "solutions" to waste management problems do not seem to be easily reconciled with each other. An important reason for this seeming irreconcilability is that stakeholder groups often portray the effects of a particular plan in a carefully simplified, bounded, context-specific manner. Unfortunately, the waste management system is far too complex for such simplistic analyses. As such, proponents of any one policy rarely consider the complete set of effects or the tradeoffs implied by that policy change. To address these issues, this project, the first-year of a multi-year fundamental analysis of the solid waste management system, has produced a simulation which includes all major waste management technologies (landfilling, incineration, recycling, composting, and source reduction), the socioeconomics of the waste management system (the markets, the costs/benefits and their distributions), and the impacts of different policies and regulations. The analysis provides insights and answers regarding the complete effects of proposed solid waste management policy changes, as well as the tradeoffs when choosing among them in the case of a simplified case study. The project has produced a graphical display simulation model that should aid in understanding the policy options, evaluation of different strategies and communication of the results. Future plans include calibration of the model to an actual planning situation for a public waste management entity. Actual data from a regional case study will be used to calibrate and validate the model. Inconsistencies and formulation needs will be identified and problems will be reconciled in order to accurately depict the policy making needs of a particular public waste management entity. Then the model will be made available more generally through the Department of Energy to examine prospective policy choices that must be made by municipal solid waste decision-makers in government and industry.