Municipal solid waste management: potential for energy improvement

Uncontrolled waste disposal has resulted in serious problems such as environmentalpollution in the world. On the other hand, vast amount of wastes has caused a lot ofproblems due to availability of areas to discard wastes. In order to overcome theseissues, waste to energy (WtE) technologies play an important role in municipal solidwaste (MSW) management. WtE conversion processes are thermal (directcombustion and incineration), biological (fermentation and anaerobic digestion),thermochemical (gasification, pyrolysis, torrefaction) and future green techniques(microbial fuel cell (MFC) and microbial electrolysis cell (MEC)). The currentreview paper discusses these processes to minimize utilization of traditional methodsfor waste management.

Keywords:

Municipal solid waste , waste to energy , biochemical , thermochemical