The Recovery of Energy and Compost from Municipal Solid Waste

Instructor: Masoud Kayhanian, Department of Civil & Environmental Engineering, College of Engineering

Description: Each year significant quantities of municipal solid waste (trash) are generally disposed to the sanitary landfills.  Disposing of trash on landfills has been known to impact our groundwater, surface water and air quality.  To prevent these environmental problems, the raw organic and biodegradable waste can be converted to energy in waste-to-energy facilities or to produce compost.  Given the uncertainties concerning the future availability, production costs, and market prices for conventional fossil fuels and inherent environmental problems associated with disposal of organic wastes, any energy that can be produced from trash deserves serious consideration.  This course is intended to provide an introduction to various methods that trash can be converted to liquid or gaseous fuel for the production of electric power as well as methods that are available to convert them to useful compost material.  The course is organized so that the students can gain the basic knowledge on topics such as: (1) the quantity and composition of trash produced annually, (2) fraction of trash can be converted into energy and compost, (3) technologies that can be used to convert organic waste into energy and compost, (4) form of fuel produced (e.g., gas, liquid or both) and their utilization for electric power generation, (5) compare waste-to-energy to other renewable sources of energy, and (6) assessing the environmental benefits.

Format: The class will meet Tuesday of each week from 5-7 PM.  The course will consist of (1) informal lectures involving student participations and their interactions, (2) video presentation of various waste-to-energy recovery and composting operation systems and (3) student presentations.  At least three energy related topics will be made available to students for their review and comments.  The students will be divided into four groups and each group will be responsible to select a relevant topic and prepare a PowerPoint presentation at the conclusion of the course.  Grading: students will be assigned a letter grade based on: (1) regular class participation and interaction (30%), (2) preparing a short critique of the regular reading assignments or video tapes (40%) and (3) the quality of final in class power point presentation (30%).

About the Instructor: Dr. Kayhanian has been a research faculty at UC Davis for the past 15 years.  He is currently a research professor and the associate director of the Center for Environmental and Water Resources Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering. Most of his current research activities are related to the fate and transport of non-point source pollutants from transportation facilities.  Prior to his current research activity Dr. Kayhanian performed numerous research projects on energy related topics.  He is the contributing author of Chapter 24 of a new book entitled of Handbook of Energy Conversion and Renewable Energy discussing Biomass Conversion Processes for Energy Recovery.  This book will be available to public on December 2006 and will serve as a reference material for this course.