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Research Highlights
Students Use EPA Decision Support Tool In Panama Waste Management Study
EPA’s Sustainable Materials And Residuals ManagemenT Decision Support Tool (SMART-DST) was developed by researchers in the National Risk Management Research Laboratory to encourage more sustainable management of solid waste. The DST provides a science-based approach to municipal waste management through use of life-cycle assessment to evaluate energy, climate change pollutants, air criteria pollutants, and waterborne pollutants. In 2009, the University of Virginia’s Department of Environmental Sciences asked EPA to assist in a study to promote sustainable development in Colon, Panama, by providing options to the region’s continued reliance on open dumping for waste disposal. BackgroundEPA’s SMART-DST is a linear programming model, developed by the RTI International and its partners, that calculates the life-cycle environmental tradeoffs and costs of different strategies for municipal solid waste management. The DST is based on a holistic approach that considers the life-cycle environmental tradeoffs and costs from waste collection, transport, recycling, composting, combustion with energy recovery, and landfilling. Multiple sectors can be considered, which allows users to evaluate differences in urban, suburban, and rural regions. DST researchers worked with representatives from state and local government, industry, environmental interest groups, trade associations, academia, and other federal agencies. A web-accessible version of the tool is to be available in 2011. The tool contains default data representative of the waste composition and management practices in North America. The industry-specific data that calculate offsets from materials recovery is also specific to North America. SMART-DST in PanamaThe University of Virginia’s (UVA) Panama Initiative (www.panama.evsc.virginia.edu), which began in 2007, expands on the notion of interdisciplinary problem solving. It joins faculty and students from four areas: the Environmental Thought and Practice Program, the Department of Environmental Sciences, the School of Engineering, and the Trans-University Center for Global Health in the School of Medicine to promote cross-disciplinary teaching and research. Panama was selected for collaborative applied research and teaching because of a recognized need among many stakeholders to balance the region’s economic growth with protection of its public health and environmental systems. Since the DST was not intended for the application being suggested in Panama, location-specific data would be needed. Ten UVA Environmental Thought and Practice seniors, working with Professor Vivian Thomson and other advisors (UVA Professor Janet Herman and Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute scientist Stanley Heckadon-Moreno) decided on a holistic approach in providing information to decision makers in Panama. Scenarios were constructed and data gaps were identified to prepare students to gather location-specific information needed to run the DST. Current practice for Colon is to take all trash to “El Dompe,” the name given by local residents to the 27-acre open dump that serves as a trash collection point. Colon City (pop. 235,000) includes the second largest free-trade zone in the world. This gigantic merchandising entity, with five major ports at the Atlantic gateway to the Panama Canal, is second only to Hong Kong in size. The zone’s 2,500 businesses generate about $16 billion annually through worldwide imports and exports. While incinerators process some waste from the free zone, the city of Colon diverts all its own wastes to its unregulated, unmonitored, 75-year-old open dump. In their case study of El Dompe, the UVA students developed three possible waste management strategies:
Panama-specific data for input into the SMART-DST model were gathered from interviews with Colon residents and from recycling companies in Panama and Central America who shared information on the market value of recyclables. Data on Panama-specific energy and offsets from recycling and information from an existing waste-to-energy facility were provided for use in the study by EPA researchers. Estimated annual deposits and makeup of trash in El Dompe came from related studies from the United Nations, the World Bank, and other sources. Scenario One: Status Quo Economically, the practice of sending Colon’s trash to El Dompe was the cheapest scenario, but the dump remains a major threat to the environment and to human health. Without protective liners, leachate flows into a stream that empties not far from Colon City’s drinking water intake. Leachate is also a threat to groundwater resources and the water table, which is only four inches below El Dompe’s surface. Without a gas collection system, air pollution is also a serious threat from emissions of methane, carbon dioxide, carbon monoxides, and others compounds commonly found at uncontrolled landfills. Dump fires, sometimes started by scavengers to retrieve valuable metals, burn regularly at El Dompe, with the potential to emit PCBs and other toxic pollutants that contribute to global greenhouse gas emissions. Windborne odors and persistent smoke plumes visible to the tourist hotels and canal ship traffic, make the dump a serious, long-term liability for a country with a growing tourism industry and an expanding free zone economy. Scenario Two: Waste to Energy In this scenario, municipal solid waste would be diverted to a waste-to-energy (WTE) incinerator and the resulting ash deposited in a sanitary landfill. Students estimated that virtually all of El Dompe’s waste stream, conservatively calculated at 110,000 tons per year, is combustible. Also, a portion of the waste could be used to fuel the incinerator itself. Advantages of the WTE scenario are the generation of marketable energy, a decrease in landfill wastes, a decrease in water and air pollution, and reduced public health costs. Disadvantages include the higher cost of operation, the need for incinerator emission controls and the disposal of ash in a controlled landfill. Since this was the most expensive option, students recommended the construction of a large incinerator to serve more than one community that would burn all solid waste generated at the combined sites. Scenario Three: Sanitary Landfill (closure of the open dump) with Recycling and Composting In this scenario, Colon’s trash would go to a Materials Recovery Facility to allow scavengers to remove saleable recyclables and to compost organic waste. In areas where scavenger communities already exist, public-private scavenger cooperatives, supported by fees, maintain the system and monitor the health and safety of scavengers (who can earn higher incomes than their counterparts in formal employment). Residual waste would go to a new, well-regulated landfill whose design would include a liner, a leachate collection system and a landfill gas collection system. Various permutations of this recycle, compost, and residual transport systems exist successfully elsewhere in the region. Virginia students noted that the SMART-DST’s ability to integrate life-cycle costs and environmental impacts could not be fully realized in the Colon study, nor could the legal, political, and institutional inputs necessary for successfully controlling El Dompe. But even with these limitations, the use of the SMART-DST provides a framework for change in Colon. In the words of UVA Professor Thomson, who supervised the project, “The model’s analytical comparisons will help highlight for all concerned—UVA faculty and students, our colleagues in Panama, and responsible authorities in Panama—the relative cost, energy, and environmental impacts of the status quo as opposed to other more protective MSW management strategies.” For more information on the Municipal Solid Waste Decision Support Tool (MSW-DST), please click on the “Building Strong Partnerships” tab on the 2009 EPA Research Highlights web page. Professor Thomson is the author of Garbage In—Garbage Out: Solving the Problems with Long-Distance Trash Transport. (University of Virginia Press, 2009). ContactsTechnical Contact: Dr. Susan Thorneloe Media Contact: Steve Doub, 513-569-7503
Hot Off the Presses—NRMRL PublicationsBook Chapter Roy, A.H., M.J. Paul, and S.J. Wenger. (2010). "Urban Stream Ecology." Chapter 16, J. Aitkenhead-Peterson and A. Volder (ed.), Urban Ecosystem Ecology. ASA, CSSA, SSSA, Madison, WI, , 341–352. Santo-Domingo, J.W., R. Lamendella, and N. Ashbolt. (2010). "Microbial Source Tracking: Current and Future Molecular Tools in Microbial Water Quality Forensics." Chapter 10, K. Sen and N. Ashbolt (ed.), Environmental Microbiology: Current Technology and Water Applications. Caister Academic Press, Norwich, UK, , c. 310. Journal Articles Shanks, O.C., K. White, C.A. Kelty, M. Sivaganesan, J. Blannon, M. Meckes, M. Varma, and R.A. Haugland. (2010). "Performance of PCR-based assays targeting Bacteroidales genetic markers of human fecal pollution in sewage and fecal samples." Environmental Science and Technology. American Chemical Society, Washington, DC, 44(16):6281–6288. Non-EPA Conference Proceedings Nestleroth, J.B., S.A. Flamberg, L. Wang, A. Chan, M.D. Royer, and A.F. Williams. (2010). "Field Demonstration of Emerging Pipe Wall Integrity Assessment Technologies for Large Cast Iron Water Mains." In Proceedings, ASCE Pipelines 2010 , Keystone, CO, August 28–September 1, 2010. American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), Reston, VA, Paper 101. Rowe, A., M. Borst, T. O'Connor, and E. Stander. (2010). "Permeable pavement demonstration at the Edison Environmental Center." In Proceedings, International Erosion Control Association Northeast Chapter Annual Conference, Hartford, CT, October 27–29, 2009. International Erosion Control Association (IECA), Denver, CO. EPA Published Reports U.S. EPA. (2010). Martel, K., M.E. Tuccillo, R. Rowe, C. Feeney, S. Hogan, G. DeBlois, S. Thayer, B. Bannon, M. Ross, and K. Enfinger. "Innovative Internal Camera Inspection and Data Management for Effective Condition Assessment of Collection Systems." (EPA/600/R-10/082). U.S. EPA. (2010). McKernan, J., A. Barton, and A. Dindal. "Test/QA Plan for Verification of Nitrate Sensors for Groundwater Remediation Monitoring." (EPA/600/R-10/104). U.S. EPA. (2010). McKernan, J., R. James, A. Gregg, Z. Willenberg, and A. Dindal. "Test/QA Plan for Verification of Microcystin Test Kits." (EPA/600/R-10/102). U.S. EPA. (2010). Tuccillo, M.E., J. Jolley, K. Martel, and G. Boyd. "Report on Condition Assessment Technology of Wastewater Collection Systems." (EPA/600/R-10/101). U.S. EPA. (2010). Sterling, R., J. Simicevic, E. Allouche, W. Condit, and L. Wang. "State of Technology for Rehabilitation of Wastewater Collection Systems." (EPA/600/R-10/078). You will need Adobe Reader to view some of the files on this page. |
