Application of biomass fraction at industrial waste incinerator

Abstract

The factor required for estimating greenhouse gas emission, i.e. the fossil carbon fraction, excludes the biomass fraction of incinerated waste and can be applied as a major factor in estimating greenhouse gas emissions. In Korea, the amount of greenhouse gases emitted from waste incineration facilities is calculated by using a solid waste incinerated amount default values (biomass fraction, content of dry matter, etc.) provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Chang (IPCC). However, this method cannot reflect the characteristics of Korea. This method is likely to overestimate or underestimate the amount of greenhouse gas emissions. This study aims to investigate the difference in emissions between the actual values of the biomass content based on the exhaust gas standard and the IPCC defaults applied in the calculation of the national emissions. The comparative result indicates that the amount of greenhouse gas emissions calculated using the solid waste composition method is 70.71 tons CO2/day and using the flue gas analysis is 56.92 tons CO2/day. This verifies that the former method overestimates the amount of greenhouse gas emissions compared with the latter method. The difference is caused by applying both factors in estimating greenhouse gas emissions and the basic values provided in the IPCC guideline. In addition, although the IPCC reported 10% of biomass content, it is 41.06% as a result of actual analysis, and hence, it is considered that there will be a difference depending on the biomass content. Thus, to increase the reliability of the calculated greenhouse gas emissions, these should be estimated by considering national characteristics.