Collection, transport and recovery of waste: a spatial explicit approach for the case of Montreal (Canada)

Abstract : Montreal has planned the installation of new anaerobic digestion plants by 2019, which will produce energy from waste that could contribute to reduce the city’s dependency on fossil fuels. However, the selective collection of small waste quantities to supply the plants increases the share of transport in the global costs, which threatens the efficiency of the recovery. This work presents a systemic approach to model the anaerobic digestion of food waste, from collection to biogas utilisation. It is used to determine the service area which maximizes the plant net energy production, considering three scenarios of plant locations and two types of alternative fuels produced. Optimal service areas were found for two of the locations, whose size encompassed 99.7% and 99.9% of the city’s total food waste production. Depending on the fuel produced, between 2000 and 3800 cars could be supplied by the plant if 60% of food waste were collected.