Balance Method – A Cost Effective Method to Determine Fossil CO2 Emissions

Up to now the standard method to determine fossil CO2 emissions is sorting of wastes into defined fractions of fossil and biogenic waste components and determining the carbon content of these fractions. From this the amount of CO2 from fossil sources can be calculated. This practice is labor and cost intensive. Therefore it is usually carried out only once a year which provides only a momentum analysis of limited significance. This paper proposes a new method that calculates the fossil CO2 emissions from waste based on standard data derived routinely from the WTE plant. The advantages are: known uncertainty range of the result, temporal resolution of the result down to daily mean values, low implementation and virtually no permanent costs. An example for the implementation of the method to an Austrian WTE plant is given.