Municipal solid waste management: potential for energy improvement

Uncontrolled waste disposal has resulted in serious problems such as environmental pollution in the world. On the other hand, vast amount of wastes has caused a lot of problems due to availability of areas to discard wastes. In order to overcome these issues, waste to energy (WtE) technologies play an important role in municipal solid waste (MSW) management. WtE conversion processes are thermal (direct combustion and incineration), biological (fermentation and anaerobic digestion), thermochemical (gasification, pyrolysis, torrefaction) and future green techniques (microbial fuel cell (MFC) and microbial electrolysis cell (MEC)). The current review paper discusses these processes to minimize utilization of traditional methods for waste management.