title: An entropy based method to evaluate hazardous inorganic substance balances of waste treatment systems.
abstract: At present, methods to assess the environmental performance of waste treatment systems are based mainly on emission standards. Since waste treatment yields also products used for recycling and/or land filling, new additional instruments are needed to analyse and evaluate the partitioning of substances during waste treatment. It is shown that in order to fulfil the goals of European Waste Management, waste treatment systems have to concentrate hazardous inorganic substances. Based on substance flow analysis and the statistical entropy function, a method is presented to classify waste treatment systems in view of their power to concentrate or dilute substances. The method allows for the determination of the Substance Concentrating Efficiency (SCE) of waste treatment systems quantitatively. The SCE approach is applied in a case study comparing waste incineration and mechanical-biological waste processing. The results show that this new tool is useful to support decisions regarding the selection of waste treatment systems.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Water Quality and Waste Management, Vienna University of Technology, Austria. helmut.rechberger@yale.edu
authors.forename: H
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Rechberger
mesh_terms: D001673:Biodegradation, Environmental; D019277:Entropy; D006256:Hazardous Waste; D017745:Incineration; D007287:Inorganic Chemicals; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D012037:Refuse Disposal / Q000379:methods*; D018570:Risk Assessment
chemical_list: D006256:Hazardous Waste; D007287:Inorganic Chemicals