Domestic Waste To Energy, Technologies, Economics, and Challenges

The increasing worldwide waste generation has been a major concern, particularly for the developing and under-developed countries of the world. As a major portion of the generated waste is domestic waste, this work compares the trending waste-to-energy technologies being followed worldwide in terms of electricity generation potential, environmental impact and economic aspects. Among several techniques that have been reviewed here, anaerobic digestion, landfill gas recovery, incineration, pyrolysis, gasification, and refuse-derived fuel are found promising. Except for a few exceptions, anaerobic digestion outperformed all the techniques having more electricity generation potential, low levelized cost of energy and installation cost.