* Corresponding author: Therese Schwarzboeck email: therese.schwarzboeck@tuwien.ac.at Detritus / Volume 02 - 2018 / pages 120-132 https://doi.org/10.31025/2611-4135/2018.13649 © 2018 Cisa Publisher. Open access article under CC BY-NC-ND license DETERMINING THE CLIMATE RELEVANCE OF REFUSE-DERIVED FUELS - VALIDITY OF LITERATURE-DERIVED VALUES IN COMPARISON TO ANALYSIS-DERIVED VALUES Therese Schwarzboeck 1 , Philipp Aschenbrenner 1 , Sarah Muehlbacher 1 , Soenke Szidat 2 , Stefan Spacek 1 and Johann Fellner 1 1 Institute for Water Quality and Resource Management, TU Wien, Karlsplatz 13, 1040 Vienna, Austria 2 Laboratory for the Analysis of Radiocarbon with AMS (LARA), Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry & Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research, University of Bern, Freiestrasse 3, 3012 Bern, Switzerland 1. INTRODUCTION Within the European Union, in 2012 already 34% of pri- mary energy carriers in cement kilns are substituted by mixed wastes and refuse-derived fuels (RDF). In Austria an average substitution rate of 75% is reported (VÖZ, 2015). The utilization of alternative fuels in energy-intensive in- dustry branches is a means to reduce the exploitation of natural resources, reduce costs and to lower fossil carbon dioxide emissions (Aranda Usón et al., 2013; Pomberger and Sarc, 2014). For the appraisal on the fossil CO 2 -savings (and therewith connected economic savings for emission certifcates), it is required to know on the one hand the car- bon content originating from materials of fossil origin in the RDF and on the other hand the overall calorifc value of the RDF. Both depend, among others (e.g., water con- tent), on the shares of fossil and of biogenic materials. In solid RDFs fossil materials comprise mainly plastics and synthetic textiles; biogenic materials could be paper, natu- ral fbers, wood, etc. The shares of the compounds in sol- id RDFs are usually not known and may vary signifcantly depending on the material used for RDF production. The material used is usually pre-treated municipal solid waste (MSW), commercial waste (CW) and industrial waste (IW). The composition thus, strongly depends on the input ma- terial and hence, on the collection and sorting schemes, and also on local industries. Further, the shares of fossil and biogenic materials present in the RDF are decided by ABSTRACT The adapted Balance Method (aBM) represents a cost effcient method for deter- mining the fossil share in solid refuse-derived fuels (RDF). The method requires data on the elemental composition of the RDF on water-and-ash-free basis (TOX RDF ) and on the elemental composition of biogenic and fossil organic matter on water-and- ash-free basis present in the RDF (TOX Bio and TOX Fos ). TOX Bio and TOX Fos generally need to be defned only once (e.g., before a routine application). After these data are known, only TOX RDF needs to be determined analytically for any RDF sample in order to apply the aBM. As TOX Bio and TOX Fos are crucial input parameter for the aBM, the presented paper aims to assess the most suitable and practical way for their reliable determination. Within this study, 6 different solid RDFs are investigated and the aBM is applied, whereby the suitability of literature values is compared to own analysis data for TOX Bio and TOX Fos . The potential utilization of literature data could save the initial workload when applying the aBM and could make the method even more economical and practical compared to other methods. Altogether, seven aBM results are compared utilizing seven different methods for generating input values of TOX Bio and TOX Fos : using generic values, literature values only, analyses results only, or combinations of literature and analyses data. The study results suggest that the usage of analysis data together with information from literature is the best option to derive reliable input data (TOX Bio and TOX Fos ) for the aBM (mean deviation from standardized methods of below 2%). The fndings further suggest that there is a typ- ical composition of the biogenic and fossil organic matter present in RDFs produced out of commercial and industrial waste. Thus, the initial workload for conducting RDF-specifc analyses could be signifcantly reduced when some more data about different types of RDFs are collected (e.g in a database). Article Info: Received: 23 January 2018 Revised: 15 May 2018 Accepted: 25 June 2018 Available online: 30 June 2018 Keywords: Refuse derived fuels Balance method Biomass content Fossil carbon Elemental composition Manual sorting