Abstract
The aim of this research is to explore the technical, economic and environmental aspects as well as the drivers and barriers of the integration of energy-from-waste (EfW) technologies within building developments in the UK. The main driver found for EfW is sustainable development, while key barriers identified include difficulties of integrating EfW within building developments and lack of waste data. This research has provided two main contributions to knowledge to overcome these barriers. The first is a decision support tool to inform an EfW technology selection process. The second is a waste estimation tool to estimate operational waste generation. Both tools are intended to be used at the early stages of a building development project when little information is known and there is a lot of uncertainty, but strategic decisions need to be made. The decision support tool has an initial technical screening phase to discard EfW technologies for which there is not enough waste or land available. The second phase is a multi criteria decision analysis integrating quantitative economic (life cycle costing) and environmental (life cycle assessment) data with qualitative stakeholder's opinions through weighting and scoring to create a ranking of preferred technologies. The waste estimation tool compiles the published benchmarks on municipal, commercial and industrial waste and supplements them with data from waste audits. It uses a simple published methodology to estimate the quantity and composition of waste generated by different building types. Both tools were tested with a group of building developments in Reading (UK), providing useful data for the client. Issues raised by stakeholders included lack of understanding of environmental criteria and not including socially generated impacts. The former was resolved by providing detailed explanations and aggregating some criteria. Addressing the latter will require further investigation in future to include noise, visual intrusion and odour issues.