Upcycling municipal solid waste: Scenario-based techno-economic evaluation and life cycle assessment

A comprehensive comparison of energy from waste (EfW) technologies is essential for guiding sustainable development. Our study examined eight EfW scenarios, including five gasification-based, one incineration-based, and two pyrolysis-based configurations, designed to produce syngas, electricity, hydrogen, methanol, and gasoline from municipal solid waste. We performed heat integration to minimize the utility demand for each scenario before conducting a techno-economic analysis (TEA) and life-cycle assessment (LCA). Because of the heat integration, the heating requirements were completely offset in all scenarios, and the cooling requirements significantly dropped. As a result of TEA, the total costs of the gasification-based scenarios ranged between 111.2 and 164.7 MMUSD/year and the pyrolysis-based scenarios exhibited the highest costs with 176.7 and 182.8 MMUSD/year. Conversely, the incineration-based scenario presented the lowest cost at 82.0 MMUSD/year. The minimum selling prices (MSP) of syngas, hydrogen, and methanol produced by gasification were 0.26, 1.68, and 0.35 USD/kg, respectively. The MSPs of electricity from lowest to highest are as follows: incineration (₵7.81/kWh), gasification (₵9.41/kWh), and pyrolysis (₵14.5/kWh). However, the pyrolysis-based scenario had a lower gasoline MSP ($2.70/gal) than the gasification-based scenario ($3.05/gal), demonstrating price competitiveness considering the market range of $2.5–3.1/gal. In addition, in conjunction with LCA, sensitivity analyses were performed to assess the impacts of economic parameters, technical parameters, plant capacity, and subsidies on the economics, offering valuable insights toward sustainability.