Solid recovery fuel from recycling facility residue.
- Single-stream recycling increases consumer recycling rates and diverts millions of tons of waste from landfills every year. However, one disadvantage of the single-stream system is that material recycling facilities have economic and practical limits on recovery efficiencies, landfilling 5-15% of total incoming material as residue. My research looks at the energetic, environmental and economic trade-offs associated with converting recycling facility residue into solid recovery fuel for use in cement kilns and coal-fired power plants. Converting the residue to fuel recovers the embedded energy of the material and replaces some portion of coal in primary energy intensive processes.
Modular distributed data centers colocated with renewable power generation.