Examination of the Low Environmental Load Wide Area Waste Treatment System
Kazuko Nakano*, Hiroyuki Miura**, Yasuhiko Wada*** and Masanao Taniguchi****Abstract
The wide area collection of waste decreases by-products such as dioxins and reduces the environmental damage with efficient recycling. However it may increase environmental costs through waste transportation and facility construction. The introduction of wide area treatment has required long distance transportation and the large-scale construction of treatment plants. In this paper, we built 18 scenarios and estimated the environmental costs arising from transportation, processing, resource recovery and final disposal. In the wide area collection, we estimated that environmental costs falt with thermal recycling and material recycling. As the result, we found the thermal recycle was more effective for reducing environmental costs. Material recycling can also decrease energy consumption, however, high levels of quality control are required to extract high quality resources from such recycling. On the other hand, even though the increase of environmental costs through transportation in the wide area collection system is not that high in view of the whole system, an efficient collection and transportation system is needed for an appropriate separation.
Key words: waste treatment, waste transport, packaging waste recycling law, the wide area waste treatment system, environmental load evaluation