Page 316 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

L1644_C07.fm Page 287 Monday, October 20, 2003 12:10 PM

FIGURE 7.8 Physical map of Europe and regional map of Catalonia.

Tarragona to the waste incinerator. It should be stressed that, although this is a
scenario with a nonvalidated MSWI model, it is introduced into this case study in
order to discuss possible results of further improvement in the flue gas treatment.
This alternative is called Scenario 3.
The function of the MSWI is its service of treating the municipal solid waste
of the Tarragona region. In this particular case study, the functional unit presented
here is 1 year of treated waste (which equals 153,467 t). However, 1 t of treated
waste as well as 1 TJ and 1 kWh of produced electricity could also be chosen.
According to the lessons learned in the application of the methodology of
environmental damage estimations for industrial process chains in Chapter 6, the
focus in this study was restricted to the transport and incineration processes. There-
fore, it is not necessary to carry out a dominance analysis and no cut-off criteria
need to be defined. However, to compare the results with midpoint indicators, the
two LCIA methods with the human toxicity potential (HTP) explained in Chapter
3 are used: CML (Heijungs et al., 1992) and EDIP (Hausschild and Wenzel, 1998).
For the weighting of the human health impacts, the physical impact parameter
“population exposure” and the DALY concept with the egalitarian perspective are
applied. Because only the AoP (area of protection) of human health is taken into
account here, no further aggregation needs to be carried out. The options of uncer-
tainty analysis, environmental risk assessment, accidents and eco-efficiency are not
considered.

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