Visualizing Landfill Mining Data
Problem
The recovery of materials from anthropogenic sources is a major element to secure European raw material supply. Apart from traditional recycling of waste, innovative concepts of urban mining and landfill mining are key to convert anthropogenic materials into secondary raw materials. In particular, the interest in landfill mining as a strategy to mitigate environmental pollution issues and recover valuable materials has been growing on the national and European level. Numerous research projects and pilot studies on landfill mining have been carried out in the past decade. In order to evaluate whether a landfill mining project pays off from an economic and/or ecological point of view (e.g., saving of greenhouse gas emissions), numerous factors (such as the composition of the waste landfilled, raw material prices, land price, legislation, treatment and transportation costs, ….) need to be considered and combined. Doing such economic and ecological evaluation of landfill mining projects manually, is time consuming and prone to errors.
Aim
The goal of this work is to design and implement a visualization software prototype (web-tool) that supports an automated evaluation of landfill mining projects (incl. the consideration of different scenarios for the mining activities). The user of the prototype should get a quick overview of his project (display of material flows associated with the landfilling mining project) and information on the ecological (in terms of greenhouse gas emissions) and economic performance of the intended mining project. Furthermore, the prototype should allow the user to save the data, so that she/he can access them at any time requested.
Other information
Starting point(s) for research:
Background information
- Winterstetter, A., Laner, D., Rechberger, H. and Fellner, J. (2015) Framework for the evaluation of anthropogenic resources: A landfill mining case study - Resource or reserve? Resources, Conservation and Recycling 96, 19-30.
- Laner, D., Cencic, O., Svensson, N. and Krook, J. (2016) Quantitative Analysis of Critical Factors for the Climate Impact of Landfill Mining. Environmental Science & Technology 50(13), 6882-6891.
Collaboration:
This project is performed in close cooperation with the Institute for Water Quality and Resource Management at TU Wien (johann.fellner@tuwien.ac.at and david.laner@tuwien.ac.at)