Improved method for calculating CO₂ emission from industrial solid wastes combustion system based on fossil and...

Waste-to-Energy (WtE) technology is the most effective solution for managing non-recyclable wastes through mass burning and energy recovery. Owing to the significant volumes of plastics in China's industrial solid wastes (ISW), a large amount of greenhouse gases (GHG) is generated during the incineration process. Therefore, monitoring GHG emissions from WtE facilities is essential. Owing to the lack of suitable accounting models and characterized fossil carbon fraction (FCF) data, current studies use default values provided by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC), which increases calculation inaccuracies. Therefore, this study established an improved method to accurately account for carbon emissions during solid waste incineration by firstly using radiocarbon dating by accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) technique to determine the FCF of the solid waste components in China. Monte Carlo analysis was employed to perform the sensitivity analysis, and the results indicated that there was a significant deviation between the measured value and IPCC's default values of FCF, 3.2, 32.48, 93.39, 93.76, 90.49, and 93.8 % for paper, cotton, synthetic textiles, artificial rubber, artificial leather, and plastics, respectively. By replacing coal with ISW in a 2 × 110 t/h circulating fluidized bed boilers, 9.251 × 10⁴ t CO₂-eq emissions were reduced, and the carbon emission factor reached 0.56 t CO₂-eq/t waste. This study complements the research gap fossil carbon data of wastes in the IPCC guidelines and provides a more accurate and effective way to calculate carbon emissions during ISW incineration treatment.