Environmental Economy Investigation on Using Anaerobic Digestion Method in Municipal Solid Waste Management in Tehran, Iran

Abstract

Tehran generates 7000 tons of municipal solid waste (MSW) daily with 70% of organic component which causes leachate and greenhouse gases generation. Anaerobic digestion (AD), as a natural process, can be a solution. On this basis, the aim of this research is to compare AD and sanitary landfilling as two scenarios environmentally and economically. So, capital cost, operational cost, environmental costs of greenhouse gases GHG emission, Benefits from GHG reduction and selling outputs has been considered and their time value has been calculated for the life span of 20 years. Although landfilling has much lower cost, AD has been selected as the best scenario due to engineering economy parameters. The benefit cost ratio and economical balance of landfilling and AD has been calculated 1.2 and 73.28 respectively. While, these figure are obtained -19.25 and 0.08 for landfilling, respectively. Finally, SWOT analysis has been done for the selected scenario.