Energy recovery from municipal solid waste by refuse derived fuel production in Malaysia

Energy recovery from municipal solid waste (MSW) is so beneficial both for the energy and for the positive environmental implications. Mainly related to the saving of primary energy derived from fossil fuel. Malaysia as a fast growing population country has the average amount of municipal solid waste (MSW) generated around 0.5-0.8 kg/person/day and it has been increased to 1.7 kg/person/day in major cities. Regarding characterization exercise, the main parts of the Malaysian MSW were found to be food, paper and plastic, which made up almost 80 % of the waste by weight. Furthermore, the average moisture content of the MSW was about 55 %, making incineration a challenging mission. In addition waste sectors in Malaysia contributes to 1.3 million ton of CH{sub 4} compare to total CH{sub 4} emission which is 2.2 MT. In order to overcome waste problem considering other technical, environmental and economical methods seems to be necessarily. Resource recovery centers recovers the maximum proportion of recyclable and recoverable resources from the mixed municipal solid waste .The resource recovery process itself is one of the step-by-step segregation and elimination of all non-combustibles , and separation of the combustibles in the desired form of fuel for good combustion. Then, a further mechanical separation process converts combustible materials to refuse derived fuel (RDF) with moisture content between 20 and 30 % and an average calorific fuel value of about 3450 kcal/kg. So, the aim of this paper is taking into account resource recovery from waste using refuse derived fuel as a secondary resource with regarding advantages and disadvantages of this kind of energy production in Malaysia as a developing country. (author)