Waste Management & Research

 

Advanced Search

Journal Navigation

Journal Home

Subscriptions

Archive

Contact Us

Table of Contents

Click here to sign up for SAGE Journal Email Alerts today!

Sign In to gain access to subscriptions and/or personal tools.
This Article
Right arrow Full Text (PDF)
Right arrow Alert me when this article is cited
Right arrow Alert me if a correction is posted
Services
Right arrow Email this article to a friend
Right arrow Similar articles in this journal
Right arrow Similar articles in PubMed
Right arrow Alert me to new issues of the journal
Right arrow Add to Saved Citations
Right arrow Download to citation manager
Right arrowRequest Permissions
Right arrow Request Reprints
Right arrow Add to My Marked Citations
Citing Articles
Right arrow Citing Articles via HighWire
Right arrow Citing Articles via Google Scholar
Google Scholar
Right arrow Articles by Rechberger, H.
Right arrow Search for Related Content
PubMed
Right arrow PubMed Citation
Right arrow Articles by Rechberger, H.
Social Bookmarking
Add to CiteULike   Add to Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us   Add to Digg   Add to Reddit   Add to Technorati  
What's this?
Waste Management & Research, Vol. 19, No. 2, 186-192 (2001)

An entropy based method to evaluate hazardous inorganic substance balances of waste treatment systems

Helmut Rechberger

Institute for Water Quality and Waste Management, Vienna University of Technology

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.

Key Words: Decision support tool; incineration; metals;entropy; substance flow analysis; waste management


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to Technorati Technorati    What's this?


This article has been cited by other articles:


Home page
 Waste Manag ResHome page
G. Finnveden, A. Bjorklund, A. Moberg, T. Ekvall, and A. Moberg
Environmental and economic assessment methods for waste management decision-support: possibilities and limitations
Waste Management Research, June 1, 2007; 25(3): 263 - 269.
[Abstract] [PDF]