Prospect of waste-to-energy technologies in selected regions of lower and lower-middle-income countries of the world

Abstract

Waste-to-energy (WTE) is one of the pathways to deal with the large amount of waste generated due to urbanization and population growth. As lower and lower-middle income countries are struggling to cope up with large electricity demands, this study focuses on the feasibility analysis of implementing three of the most popular WTE technologies (incineration, landfill gas recovery and anaerobic digestion) in the five selected regions of lower and lower-middle income countries of the world, i.e., Bangladesh, Egypt, Afghanistan, Ghana and Indonesia. The selected WTE methods were assessed in terms of electricity generation potential, economic viability and socio-environmental impacts. Except for the study areas of Bangladesh and Afghanistan, incineration has shown the highest electricity generation potential having 684.21 GWh/yr, 467.93 GWh/yr and 3341.23 GWh/yr in the selected regions of Egypt, Indonesia and Ghana, respectively. The economic analysis showed that except for the study area of Ghana, incineration has the lowest levelized cost of energy (LCOE) making this pathway the most economical one in the selected regions. The environmental analysis of the WTE pathways showed that although incineration emits the least greenhouse gases (GHG), it emits more acidic gases and organic pollutants compared to anaerobic digestion. Furthermore, the sensitivity analysis showed that the net present value (NPV) is highly sensitive to the inflation rate. An increase of 27% inflation rate will increase the NPV by 66.50% for landfill gas recovery process, which is the highest among the three techniques. The overall feasibility analysis suggests that incineration will be the best option for the selected regions (except for Ghana) for its satisfactory results. The proposed WTE pathways will open doorway to the unemployed by creating more jobs as observed from the analysis of the job creation potentials.