Management of excavated soil in infrastructure construction using multi-criteria decision analysis
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Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Insinööritieteiden korkeakoulu |
Master's thesis
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Author
Date
2021-06-14
Department
Major/Subject
Water and Environmental Engineering
Mcode
Degree programme
Master's Programme in Water and Environmental Engineering (WAT)
Language
en
Pages
45 + 1
Series
Abstract
High volumes of excavated material being landfilled conflicts with the waste policy idea adopted by Finland to prioritize generation reduction, reuse and recover over landfilling. The objective of this study is to investigate the best choice of excavated soil management taking into consideration Espoo City’s commitment to sustainable development while using Multi-criteria Decision Analysis and participatory decision. The study will compare the situation in Espoo in 2017 with two other scenarios simulating different stages of a transition from linear economy to circular economy. The multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) provides a parameter analysis to evaluate and clearly compare the presented alternatives. Soil is a key resource, but it is not yet specially highlighted in urban plans. The three alternative studied were: scenario S0, the current situation at the time of the study; scenario S1, to invest on the establishment of two temporary deposits enabling improving the reuse of gravel and high bearing capacity soil; scenario S2, seek to recycle 75% of all the excavated soil, with the implementation of more temporary deposits and/or new technologies to enable the reuse of all types of the excavated material. The comparison of scenario results led to a recommendation that the city of Espoo should try to implement scenario S2. Scenarios S0 and S1 obtained similar score, but scenario S1 has the advantage of possibly functioning as a more realistic intermediate step to achieving the conditions in scenario S2 in the future. MCDA can be used as alternative way to improve the participation of city committees and help the participants to understand different points of view. In the sensitivity analysis, the marginal utility contribution for every criterion was replaced by the extreme values 0 and 1 for all the scenarios consecutively. The biggest impact resulted of the criterion “Virgin Raw Material Demand” receiving the value 0 in scenario S2. In this case, scenarios S1 and S2 received quite similar scores and scenario S0 had a bit lower score.The comparison of the criterion values used in this study and obtained from literature indicate that it is unlikely that this criterion would behave like in the sensitivity analysis and changes in the inputs would most likely not have a big impact on the final result proportions.Description
Supervisor
Koivusalo, HarriThesis advisor
Pakkala, PekkaKeywords
MCDA, soil management, circular economy, excavated soil
