Summary:

Successive closing down of filled-up large municipal landfill sites or those which no longer fulfil the legal regulations, compel local governments and enterprises dealing with waste disposal, to undertake activities aimed at designing and construction of new waste management plants. One of these is a municipal solid waste sorting plant where the waste stream is divided into sub-screen and screen fraction. The screen fraction after removing ferrous and non-ferrous metals, glass and other impurities and crushing to an appropriate particle size constitutes an alternative fuel. The most frequently alternative fuel is manufactured from selectively collected plastics, rubber, textiles and waste paper. Alternative fuel is also manufactured from municipal solid waste in mechanical waste treatment plants. Municipal solid waste is characterized by a non-uniform morphological composition (depending on many factors), which may result in variable parameters of the manufactured fuel. If the waste fuel manufactured in this way and supplied to cement plants does not reach certain quality standards, its price is low, or the product is not accepted for energy recovery. The work presents results of analyses of selected properties of alternative fuels generated from solid municipal waste stream with regard to the type of communes from which the waste originated (urban commune area or rural communes). Statistical analysis was conducted using Bayesian Networks.
As it results from the investigations, alternative fuel manufactured from municipal solid waste is characterized by high values of variation coefficient for such parameters as: ash content, moisture and calorific value. The content of carbon, sulphur and incineration heat revealed low values of variance coefficient. The analyses have demonstrated that technological values of alternative fuel do not depend on the administrative type of the communes where the waste used for their production was collected.