Citation:

Sampat, A., Y. Hu, M. Sharara, H. Aguirre-Villegas, G. Ruiz-Mercado, R. Larson, AND V. Zavala. Coordinated management of organic waste and derived products. COMPUTERS AND CHEMICAL ENGINEERING. Elsevier Science Ltd, New York, NY, 128:352-363, (2019).

Impact/Purpose:

Urban, agricultural, and food sectors produce significant amounts of organic waste. Organic waste releases excess nutrients, chemicals, and biological agents to the soil, surface and ground waters, and emissions into the atmosphere. Nutrients such as phosphorus and nitrogen accumulate in surface water bodies triggering harmful algal blooms and degrading the quality of water resources. In this work, we apply concepts of electricity markets to design a coordinated market for organic waste that balance supply and demands in a given geographical region. In this market, bids are submitted by suppliers and consumers for waste and derived products as well as by transportation and technology providers for their services. The framework can be used by government agencies to understand and predict the effect of different regulation and incentive mechanisms. Also, the framework is able to provide local, regional, and state stakeholders a systematic approach to enable coordinated responses to externalities such as droughts and extreme weather events, to monetize environmental impacts and remediation, to achieve geographical nutrient balancing, and to justify technology investment and development efforts. Furthermore, the framework can facilitate coordination with other electrical, natural gas, water, and transportation, and food distribution infrastructures.

Description:

We propose a coordination framework for managing urban and rural organic waste in a scalable manner by orchestrating waste exchange, transportation, and transformation into value-added products. The framework is inspired by coordinated management systems that are currently used to operate power grids across the world and that have been instrumental in achieving high levels of efficiency and technological innovation. In the proposed framework, suppliers and consumers of waste and derived products as well as transportation and technology providers bid into a coordination system that is operated by an independent system operator. Allocations and prices for waste and derived products are obtained by the operator by solving a dispatch problem that maximizes the social welfare and that balances supply and demand across a given geographical region. Coordination enables handling of complex constraints and interdependencies that arise from transportation and bio-physico-chemical transformations of waste into products. We prove that the coordination system delivers prices and product allocations that satisfy economic and efficiency properties of a competitive market. The framework is scalable in that it can provide open access that fosters transactions between small and large players in urban and rural areas and over wide geographical regions. Moreover, the framework provides a systematic approach to enable coordinated responses to externalities such as droughts and extreme weather events, to monetize environmental impacts and remediation, to achieve complex social goals such as geographical nutrient balancing, and to justify technology investment and development efforts. Furthermore, the framework can facilitate coordination with electrical, natural gas, water, transportation, and food distribution infrastructures.

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