Waste, Climate & Monitoring

Research in the section
The topics below covers the research performed in the section

Currently, the research activities are focused around four topics.

• Greenhouse gas monitoring and remediation at full scale: advanced analytic field monitoring techniques (land based and airborne) have been developed and applied to a range of point source such as landfills, biogas plants, composting plants, manure storage, and recently to cities. Remediation technology in terms of bio covers at landfills has been developed and tested in full scale .
• Material flow and life-cycle-assessment modelling (MFA/LCA): The advanced EASETECH model is hosted and used in numerous studies quantifying the environmental and resource aspects of various approaches and systems for handling waste, including municipal waste, sewage sludge, building and construction waste as well as specific materials such as plastic and textiles.
• Socio-economic issues in a resource-efficient society: Socio-economic aspects of enhancing waste prevention and improving recycling are in focus, for example related to textiles, furniture, and the design of recycling centers .

We collaborate with the Danish authorities (the Danish Environmental Protection Agency and the Danish Energy Agency), waste and wastewater utility companies, engineering consultants, industry and private companies, universities, and European research infrastructures (ERIC).

We operate two ICOS ecosystem observation field sites, the class on beech forest ecosystem observation site (DK-Sor) with one of the worldwide, third longest, continuous CO2 flux observation records, and the short rotation bioenergy production site close to DTU-Risø campus (DK-RCW).

We build a radio mast-based system to determine landscape scale GHG fluxes as a prototype for a Danish GHG exchange observation system.

We have mobile analytical platforms to quantify atmospheric GHG exchanges from point and area sources.

We rebuild a phytotron for plant, soil and mini-ecosystem climate manipulation experiments for climate change research at the DTU-Risø campus as contribution to the ESFRI AnaEE.