WARM Integration with BESSE

We merged BESSE with the US EPA’s Waste Reduction Model’s (WARM) latest update (version 16). WARM is a comprehensive open-source model for computing greenhouse gas emissions, energy requirements, and a number of economic outcomes (wages, jobs, taxes generated) during the management of materials and wastes. At present 61 materials or material mixes are included along with 6 management options—recycling, landfilling, combustion, anaerobic digestion, composting, and source reduction (comprehensive lists can be found in the WARM documentation).

The WARM model is spreadsheet-based and contains emission factors for materials and wastes as they are paired with various management options. Calculations make use of three open-source models with an extensive history of use in the energy, environmental, and economic areas.

• The CENTURY SOIL CARBON MODEL simulates the long-term dynamics of carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, and sulfur. It tracks the movement of carbon through soil pools—active, slow, and passive,
• The USDA Forest Service’s FORCARB II model of the U.S. forest sector. USDA FS models and data sets are the most thoroughly documented and peer-reviewed models available for characterizing and simulating the species composition, inventory, and growth of forests, and
• The Waste Input-Output (WIO) model is built on the official Input-Output (IO) tables maintained by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Since WARM’s model is spreadsheet-based and uses a variety of formulae, macro functions, databases, and open-source models, we used an open-source tool called SheetJS to make a two-way communication between the Excel sheets and our backend which presented us with a simple JS interface that works with Array of JS Objects. We converted the WARM spreadsheet into an array of arrays of JSON Objects.

Additionally, we made use of the HyperFormula library to execute the formulae in the WARM spreadsheet without running MS Excel. Next, Deployed the desired functions to extract useful information from WARM for a given auction on Firebase and integrated these functions with BESSE.

The general approach was to allow users to define each auction’s “baseline” system and it’s “preferred” system of waste and material processing within BESSE as the auctions are set up. The scenario calculations are output in the same format WARM now uses, including summary statistics (greenhouse gasses, energy requirements, and economic information) and analysis of the results. At last, we updated the User Interface to depict the estimated summary statistics including MTCO2E, Energy, Labor Hours, Wages, and Tax numbers for every auction.

Because the only waste management practice available on BESSE as of 04/20/2023 is "recycling", we have used recycling as the fixed alternate waste management practice. And for the ease of use, we have also fixed landfilling as the baseline waste management practice.

The next video depicts the integration of WARM and BESSE:

If the video doesn't play, click here (opens in a new tab)