News Story

Applied Smouldering Combustion for Supporting a Circular Economy

Wednesday 7 Jan 2026

Sustainable waste management requires significant increases in the proportion of waste and its components being reused, repurposed, and recycled instead of landfilled. Recent research and regulations have supported growing interest in circular economies, with a significant focus on making waste management processes more cyclic, increasing reuse, and reducing disposal.

Resource recovery of nutrients and metals from municipal and industrial wastewater treatment plants and other sources of sludges may relieve the depletion of essential elements and have significant environmental and economic benefits. Thermal technologies offer strong promise for combining resource recovery with the robust destruction of hazardous compounds that must be removed from a circular economy.

A new book chapter by Tarek Rashwan reviews how applied smouldering, an emerging thermal technology, has demonstrated unique benefits in integrating challenging wastes into circular economies, such as high moisture content and hazardous wastes, with minimal energy footprint and limited pre-processing infrastructure.

Read the book chapter here: https://oro.open.ac.uk/103910/

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