Extended exergy accounting applied to waste-to-energy facilities location-allocation problem

With the unexpected increase in municipal solid waste (MSW), the existing waste-to-energy (WTE) facilities have been overloaded, which has posed a severe threat to urban environmental safety. The location of WTE facilities directly determines the economic costs and is essential to sustainable urban development. However, most of the current WTE facility location models are constructed based on optimization frameworks. These frameworks mainly consider economic costs, transportation distances, emissions and capacity limitations, often ignoring the comprehensive integration of thermodynamic efficiency and social environmental factors. Herein, we propose a novel Mixed-Integer Linear Programming (MILP) model integrating Extended Exergy Accounting (EEA) to optimize WTE facility locations by evaluating thermodynamic, economic, social, and environmental impacts. The case study on the site allocation for solid waste incineration plants in Shenzhen City shows that, compared with the current situation and the site allocation plan proposed by the government, the model proposed in this paper generates less external environmental and social costs exergy when handling the same amount of household waste, and can recover more valuable products. It generates 31.06% and 24.12% more additional value products respectively. Our research results indicate that strategic facility layout can reduce transportation energy consumption and dependence on landfill, providing an expandable solution for sustainable municipal solid waste management.