Développement d’une approche d’évaluation de la performance énergétique des processus de collecte et de transport associés à une filière de valorisation des matières résiduelles au sein d’un territoire

Abstract

Modern society is based on a lineal economy model, in which the resources are extracted to production and after their use, these products are discarded as waste to the environment. The increase of the world’s population and the generated waste is driving awareness concerning environmental issues and a growing interest on reuse, recycling, and recovery of materials. Based on a systemic approach, this research project develops an approach to asses the energetic performance for the waste recovery process, considering the processes of collection and transportation attached to the recovery processes of the waste materials in the territory. Organized in three different parts, the first part of this projects shed light on the hierarchization of the collection and transportation based on the constructal theory. The results demonstrated that the structure of collection using 4 levels is energetically more efficient than the commonly used structure with 2 levels. The second part of this project presents an approach for the integration of the spatial characteristics of the territory (densities of the traffic system and population) to the evaluation of the performances of the processes of collection and transportation applied to the biomethane recovery of organic waste. The results show the efficiency limits of the biomethane recovery regarding the travelled distances for the collection and transportation of waste materials, including the territorial characteristics of the Québec regions. The thirst part of the project is based on the proposed approach of the second part to a territory formed by smaller territories (municipalities) with different spatial characteristics. This approach shed light on the impact of the decentralization of the recovery facilities for the waste materials based on the territorial characterization of each municipality and the energetic performance of the scenarios considered. The approach developed in this research project contributes to the systemic analysis of the global chain of material recovery suggesting new avenues worth exploring to increase their performance. Concerning the location of the recovery facilities, the integration of the material recovery process to the waste management process allows to a comprehensive study of the environmental impacts of the recovery centers at a territorial level.

Date	7 Oct 2024
Original language	French
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Mathias Glaus (Supervisor)