B. Group level - The Solid Waste Engineering and Recycling Group
This group has established itself during the recent few years. Solid waste management has, however, been taught in the department since the middle of the 1970s, in the first years by researchers from SINTEF and later by various personnel at the department. In 1983 an adjunct professor position was established. Due to the fact that adjunct professor positions are only on a 20% part time basis, there were few real opportunities for building a research activity, and a group as such, during those years.
Since 1997, dr.ing. Helge Brattebø is heading the overall activity in this area. He was first recruited on a 20% time basis, as Professor of Solid Waste Engineering and Recycling, until August 1998, while working in the area of industrial ecology at the Centre for Environment and Development (SMU) at NTNU. After reorganizing the activity of SMU, Brattebø was offered a full time professorship at our department. However, for the period from August 1998 until July 2003 he has been active only on a 50% time basis, including teaching obligations, as he has been appointed Leader of the Industrial Ecology Programme at NTNU during this whole period.
Dr.ing. Aage Heie was recently appointed Adjunct Professor in Solid Waste Management, for his fourth period (professorship financed by the university). Heie has soon 30 years of professional experience in the field of solid waste management. He has held positions as a Senior Scientist (in Sintef), a Senior Solid Waste Management Engineer (in A/S Miljøplan and Det Norske Veritas AS), and a Senior Waste Management Consultant (in Interconsult AS and at present in NORSAS AS). Consequently, he has a unique insight and personal network in the practical challenges and technical solutions in the field.
In August 2003 dr.ing. Kjell Øren was employed as Adjunct Professor in Industrial Ecology, (professorship financed by Norsk Hydro). As part of this position Øren is expected to carry out most of his work towards the Industrial Ecology Programme, from a formal position at our department as well as his main occupation as Vice President for Environment in Norsk Hydro. Øren has developed excellent contacts nationally and internationally in his area of profession; environmental reporting, EE modelling and corporate strategies in the area of industrial ecology and climate change abatement policy.
At present there are 4 PhD-students in the group (Kjetil Røine, Arne Eik, Rolf Andre Bohne and Anders Klang), all of them doing research in the field of waste recycling and industrial ecology. In practice they are all carrying out their daily work outside the department; Røine, Eik and Bohne at NTNU’s Industrial Ecology Programme (IndEcol), and Klang at Mid-Sweden University in Östersund.
1. Description of research activities
The solid waste engineering and recycling group is a modelling and analytically oriented research group with most of the projects targeting the evaluation of environmental performance and change in national and local waste recycling systems, as well as the application of industrial ecology principles in the solid waste sector. This implies a much stronger focus to life cycle analysis, waste prevention, recycling and material loop closing schemes than to individual solid waste treatment technologies, such as landfilling, incineration or composting.
The research group is a small one with limited resources at present. Yet, together with the competence of IndEcol, the group has succeeded to develop important analytical capacity, of a type that is totally new in Norway, as well as developing closer links with industrial and governmental users in the area.
One line of recent research has given rise to projects towards the Norwegian take-back system for packaging waste, a system enforced by a EU-directive and national initiatives where the aims have been to build a comprehensive infrastructure for collective take-back of waste packaging fractions and achieve high recycling and recovery goals during few years of operation. Towards those systems we have studied issues such as organisational design (producer responsibility in practice), materials flows, and Eco-Efficiency (EE) parameters that include indicators for economic efficiency and environmental effectiveness. Most of this research is carried out through the PhD-projects of Kjetil Røine (Implementation of producer responsibility in plastic packaging systems) and Arne Eik (EE modelling in plastic packaging systems). This research is carried out in close collaboration with industry, e.g. Tomra Systems ASA and Plastretur AS, and has been an important part of the Productivity 2005 Industrial Ecology research project, funded by the Norwegian Research Council.
A second line of research includes projects towards the rapidly developing systems of Construction and Demolition waste (C&D waste), particularly with a focus to heavy fractions and transportation with respect to EE performance. We believe that the systems of C&D waste, as well as the practical solutions, will become very important in the future, due to increasing waste generation, high recycling rates and intuitive challenges in terms of heavy downcycling of materials in such systems. At present we work with combinations of dynamic modelling of C&D waste generation, materials flow analysis (MFA) and environmental life cycle analysis (LCA) and Input-Output (IO) models, in order to reveal a better understanding of such systems.
During the last years Aage Heie has been active in more applied research, in which he has studied waste generation and composition in a number of locations, the generation and utilization of methane gas from landfills, and the potentials for recycling of residues from solid waste incineration plants. This work has, however, been carried out outside the department.
Kjell Øren has joined the group very recently and has thus not yet had the chance to do research work. It is expected that he will initiate projects in the area of corporate implementation of industrial ecology, an area which is only weakly linked to the practical aspects of solid waste engineering, but strongly addresses EE modelling and evaluations.
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