2017 International VerTech Student Design Competition - "ECOnnectivity"
ECOnnectivity : Virtually Connecting Waste Entities in Lafayette Parish
In 2017 International VerTech Student Design Competition an interdisplinary team took home1st Place for their competition project "ECOnnectivity". Competing against students from Canada and Mexico, two UL Lafayette groups placed in first and third in the Green City Student Design competition. The challenge was to construct economical and functional solutions that would help in creating more sustainable cities around the world.
First place winners of $2,500 included Blair Begnaud (Architecture M.S. Student and Office of Sustainability Graduate Research Assistant), Sam Ekong (Computer Science M.S. Student), Kyle Farmer (Chemical Engineering B.S. Student), Nicholas Marcil (Chemical Engineering B.S. Student), Walker Powell (MBA Student), and Jonathan Trahan (Civil Engineering M.S. Student) with their design focusing on connecting the already-existing waste generators, the waste transporters and the waste treaters in the Acadiana area, using each step to then convert leftover food from the community into usable fuel.
Project Summary
In cities around the world, precious resources are thrown to the wayside as waste with
no possibility of further utilization. This is especially true for the organic fraction of both
municipal solid waste and wastewater bio-solids produced in the United States, which
contain useful energy and chemicals within. Unfortunately, the widespread
implementation of systems that take advantage of such resources have been hindered
by a lack connectivity between waste generators, haulers, treatment facilities, and
government permitting. Fortunately, ECOnnectivity, while still in its early stages of
development, is here to begin helping to overcome these social obstacles.
ECOnnectivity is a big data based software, utilizing the internet of things (IOT), which
virtually links waste entities in ways that facilitates the sharing of organic wastes and the
resources derived from them. It does this by gathering and storing data from each waste
entity to calculate mass and energy balances, economic analysis, optimized waste
collection routes, and eventually much more. With the ability to store large amounts of
data onto a central server, ECOnnectivity will also serve communities as a decision
support system (DSS) for large-scale projects in an attempt to reduce wastefulness
while increasing the sustainability of future cities. Though ECOnnectivity has prospects
of spreading to much wider areas of interest, this report will focus on the use of a
rudimentary version of the software to examine the usefulness of transporting source
separated organics produced by commercial-scale organic waste generators in
Lafayette Parish to the three wastewater treatment plants (WWTP) in Lafayette for
energy recovery through anaerobic digestion.
To begin, optimized routes were created through Lafayette Parish based on road miles
traveled, capacity of nearby digesters located at WWTPs, and greatest net positive
energy production. These may seem like conflicting objective, but the results show that
increasing any of these parameters will cause an increase in the system as a whole.
These optimized routes would then be relayed to waste haulers in the area using the
Google Maps API on a handheld GPS. Next, an economic analysis was run for each
waste entity based on research of the process. This resulted in a best-case scenario for
Lafayette Parish that covered a total of 337 road miles for one holistic pickup, collecting
9377 tons of organic food waste per year, producing 0.66 MW of net power. While this
is considered a small-scale power plant, it represents the powering of roughly 950
residential homes or 160 commercial businesses. When looking at the results of the
economic analysis, ECOnnectivity showed that while the waste haulers are able to turn
a profit of $400,500 per year, the WWTPs would need government subsidies of $13.30
per ton of organic waste treated. This corresponds to $185,000 per year, to reach a
reasonable payback period of roughly 12 years under the assumed conditions of waste
generation, capital cost, and operation and maintenance cost