Municipal Solid Waste Valorization into Chemical Solvents for Industrial Symbiosis: Techno-Economic and Environmental Assessment

Waste incineration with combined heat and power (CHP) supplies electricity and heat to cities and industrial clusters but remains a significant source of greenhouse gas emissions. This work develops an optimization-based, system-level decarbonization framework for an integrated waste-to-energy and chemical production cluster under operational, societal, and economic constraints. The framework is applied to a real-world case study including a municipal waste incineration plant, an energy utility system, and multiple chemical production units. A layered decarbonization strategy is implemented. First, energy efficiency is enhanced through waste heat valorization using heat pumps. Second, coordination between industrial actors is improved through solid waste storage management and operational alignment of heat and power supply with demand. Third, alternative feedstocks are introduced to reduce fossil-based inputs. Within the work material and heat-stream inventories are collected, and the required chemical synthesis pathways are modeled using Aspen Plus. The integrated system is optimized within the OSMOSE framework using a multi-period mixed-integer linear programming formulation that minimizes the annualized total cost while accounting for seasonal heat demand and electricity price variability. The results show that waste-heat upgrading alone enables fossil emission reductions of up to 22% while improving overall system profitability. More broadly, up to 80% of fossil-based Scope 1 and Scope 2 CO2 emissions can be reduced through energy efficiency improvements, system integration, and feedstock substitution prior to carbon capture deployment. To address the remaining hard-to-avoid emissions and enable net-negative operation, post-combustion carbon capture options are evaluated in combination with solid oxide electrolysis cells (SOEC).