I am working with a model mainly looking at municipal solid waste and recycling/energy production from landfills, incineration... with only a small bit of detail on the energy shares. I want to assess changes in waste production from households & industry and associated emissions based on a few policy scenarios. I do have most of my data inputted now, but am not sure how to model something that is not an energy product. I want to demonstrate the production of waste in kg, and the inherent waste in urban and rural households. I entered the population as a key assumption as well as details related to urban, rural and industrial waste production shares tied to population.

But how do I tie this to the Demand and Transformation branches? I can add municipal solid waste as a fuel under processes, but that only makes sense for recycling... I need it as an output. I can similarly add it under demand for households, but not sure that makes sense either, I need it as something produced by the households. I only need it as a fuel in one case, with incineration, and that is not the main point of the model.

(When it does get there, I am not sure how to relate the incinerated MSW to the percentages in the waste stream from the sources that aren't recycled... Or with recycling, how to relate that recycled waste returns to the waste stream as well...

Have any of you included MSW in your models that might have tips or examples? I would much appreciate it, time is running out for my thesis!

Thank you.

Since LEAP is designed to help you do energy accounting, all products produced or consumed throughout your model must be assigned an energy content - in other words, LEAP will think of these products as energy carriers (fuels). Municipal Solid Waste is one fuel which is "pre-installed" in LEAp's fuels database, but you may create additional fuels with different names or properties by opening the "Fuels" data base (in the main toolbar) and adding a new one.

While the physical picture that you are trying to model may be of households and industry (on LEAP's demand side) producing a fuel which is later consumed for energy production (on LEAP's transformation side), this is not how LEAP works. Instead, you will need to calculate the total amount of available waste each year - this may depend on population or other factors, as you've already pointed out - and convert that into production capacity for process(es) inside transformation modules which consume waste to produce other fuels, like electricity. But a key point is that it is not necessary to explicitly model the production of waste using a transformation module.

Have a look at these help files for some background:

https://www.energycommunity.org/Help/Demand/Demand.htm

https://www.energycommunity.org/Help/Transformation/Transformation.htm

Hope this helps for now. Please feel free to use the forum for specific questions about this as they arise.

Taylor