Solid Recovered Fuel – Optimization of Plants in the Polish Economic Reality

The article presents an economic analysis of the development of the waste management system and the district heating system from the point of view of Polish medium-sized towns. As part of this analysis, the article presents a comparison of the three strategies: “Minimalist strategy”, “Low emission strategy” and “Sustainable strategy” in the context of a key elements of the overall strategy of the European Commission. The purpose of the analysis is selection of project that offer the most favorable ratio of costs incurred to the results, taking into account not only financial results but also the social aspects and impact of the project on the environment. For this reason the Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA) of the project was carried out. The final result is affected by financial, energy, supplies, social and environmental efficiency. Due to the complexity of the decision problem, for pre-selection of the most advantageous option, multi-criteria method of Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was used. The purpose of this method is to enable a more efficient allocation of resources by demonstrating the superiority of the intervention over the other from the point of view of the overall benefits - including a number of criteria which could not be directly compared. The result of the conducted analysis is the choice of the integrated model of “Sustainable strategy” as the most effective both socially and financially.