Nexus Modelling // Involving the Water–Energy–Food Nexus in Integrating Low-Income and Isolated Communities
By Brenda Cansino-Loeza and José María Ponce-Ortega. This work presents a general mathematical programming model for satisfying water, energy, and food needs in isolated and low-income communities involving different process integration approaches. As a case study, the community with the lowest index of poverty and marginalization from the State of Guerrero in Mexico is presented. The problem consists in determining the optimal and sustainable configuration to satisfy the energy, water, and food demands of the inhabitants. Also, the use of waste-to-energy technologies is proposed to handle the municipal solid waste correctly and obtain valuated products from wastes to reduce the environmental impact.
A multi-objective analysis is presented considering the consumption of fresh water, the greenhouse gas emissions, and the cost of the integrated system as objective functions.
The results show that it is possible to satisfy the water, energy, and food needs in isolated communities accounting for integrated processes. Besides, it is possible to obtain trade-off solutions considering contradicting objectives. To trade-off the proposed objectives, it is presented a multistakeholder approach which is capable to find the compromise solution which is the point where the objectives are minimized simultaneously. The results show that the compromise solution is very close of the Utopian Point, which indicates that is possible to obtain a solution that satisfies almost entirely the minimum of the objectives.
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ACS Sustainable Chemistry and Engineering
Published
January 2019
In
ACS Sustainable Chem. Eng. 2019, 7, 1399−1418