Last 19th of May 2020, ESR John Laurence Esguerra (JL as he likes to be called) successfully defended his Licentiate Thesis. In Sweden, Licentiate is an intermediate degree awarded on the way to a PhD. JL is jointly supervised by Joakim Krook and Niclas Svensson of Linköping University and Steven Van Passel of the University of Antwerp.
As part of the Work Package 4, JL’s research is about the development of a generic model to assess and understand the economics of landfill mining. The presented model involves exploratory scenario development to cover multiple possibilities of landfill mining projects in a region with expected wide variations in site settings, project designs as well as policy and market conditions. It also involves global sensitivity analysis to identify the underlying critical factors and their interactions that drive the economy of landfill mining.
In his thesis, JL discussed the usefulness and validity of the developed model in relation to other applied economic assessment approaches in previously conducted studies. It is highlighted that such a generic and learning-oriented approach is necessary to facilitate a strategic development of potentially profitable landfill mining implementation. In the coming year, JL will extend the model by including environmental assessment and by covering advanced technologies.
JL’s licentiate thesis and key publications are as follows:
Esguerra, J.L., 2020. Economics of Landfill mining: Usefulness and validity of different assessment approaches. Licentiate Thesis. Linköping University. ISBN 978-91-7929-852-4 https://doi.org/10.3384/lic.diva-165391
Esguerra, J.L., Krook, J., Svensson, N., Van Passel, S., 2019. Assessing the economic potential of landfill mining: Review and recommendations. Detritus 8, 125–140. https://doi.org/10.31025/2611-4135/2019.13883
Laner, D., Esguerra, J.L., Krook, J., Horttanainen, M., Kriipsalu, M., Rosendal, R.M., Stanisavljević, N., 2019. Systematic assessment of critical factors for the economic performance of landfill mining in Europe: What drives the economy of landfill mining? Waste Manag 95, 674–686. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wasman.2019.07.007
