Evaluation of the potential of recycling for the reduction of energy and CO2 emissions in Brazil

The climatic changes provoked by the emissions of the greenhouse effect gases urged the United Nations to create a document containing eight goals called “Millennium Development Goals” to be achieved until 2015. One of these goals is the MDG7, refers to the sustainability of the planet. Recycling the household solid waste is an additional effort in this direction. This paper presents the environmental and energy impacts of case study of recycling the household solid waste from the City of Campinas based upon official data and reports. It was found that the energy economy due to recycling is 7.59 MW and 1.21 GW for Campinas and Brazil, respectively. The avoided CO2 emissions to the atmosphere in the case of Campinas and Brazil are found to be 936.9 tCO2/month or 247 CERs/month and 200,775.7 tCO2/month or 51,167.8 CERs/month, respectively. Two sceneries are presented to estimate the potential of recycling all the household solid waste in Brazil. The total economized energy predicted from the two sceneries are 15.44 GW and 14.18 GW respectively, while the amounts of CERs predicted from the two sceneries are found to be 6.561 × 105 and 6.026 × 105 respectively. These results indicate good agreement and hence validate the calculation procedure and the adopted assumptions.