Waste to energy closed-loop supply chain: Recycling energy supply, collaborative operation and sustainability

Abstract: A representative sustainable collaborative economy refers to the innovative and rational use of natural resources. Nowadays, tons of wastes are generally dumping in modern agriculture and economic lifestyles every year. More than 6 million tons of wastes can be generated every day until 2025. However, waste management is still lacking in most developing countries, together with low energy efficiency, resource wasting, and serious environmental pollution. Therefore, it is of great practical significance to seek a scientific way for waste recovery, treatment and utilization, thereby replacing fossil fuels, while protecting the ecological environment for the sustainable energy development of human society, especially in rural areas. Lately, the initiated waste-to-energy supply chain was widely expected as an efficient way to reduce carbon footprint for high efficiency of resource management. An integrated closed-loop supply chain was thus formed to couple the independent operation links, including the collection, processing, transportation, biomass power generation, heating and biomass fuel, as well as multi-energy complementary. Therefore, the resource assessment is primarily critical to realize the recycling, stable sustainability, and utilization of waste resources in the development of waste to energy. This study focused on the coordinated operation between the recycling energy supply and sustainable development using the whole chain of waste recycling, resource treatment, and multi-energy complementary supply. A systematic analysis was made to integrate energy supply and environmental synergies for the development of renewable energy in the management of waste to energy. Furthermore, the coupling connection and closed-loop interaction were also utilized to realize the collaborative operation of resource circulation, multi-energy complementary, and networks. More importantly, modern biomass energy was playing a positive role in achieving sustainable economy. The closed-loop supply chain from waste to energy cycle was also directly related to multiple sustainable development goals. The cross-compatibility indicators were integrated to guide the major demand for the coordinated development of global energy, economy, environment, and society under the framework of sustainable development goals of the United Nations. A sustainability evaluation index system was established to identify unsustainable risks, ranging from endogenous and exogenous risks in multiple dimensions. A social environment dimension was defined as the public part of the environment and social attributes, while an environmental economy dimension was defined as the public part of the environment and economic attributes, and a social economy dimension was the public part of social and economic attributes. Among them, the endogenous risk mainly occurred in the raw material collection, intermediate product transportation, energy production, and consumption, whereas, the external risk involved the political, legal, economic, social, and natural environment in the closed-loop supply chain. Additionally, the collection of biomass raw materials and single-resource processing were abundant in the research reports in recent years. Nevertheless, the uncertain risk assessment on sustainability is still lacking. Consequently, a promising direction can be drawn to form the decision-making paradigm of collaborative management from waste to energy recycling, thereby avoiding the unsustainable risks from the closed-loop supply chain in the future. The finding can offer strong support to waste management, comprehensive energy supply, and environmental governance in the sustainable collaborative economy.