Solid Waste Research and Education Initiatives
https://erefdn.org/research-grants-projects/how-to-apply-for-grant/

It should be noted that EREF defines solid waste in the RFP to include:

• municipal solid waste (e.g. residential, commercial, institutional)
• construction & demolition debris
• certain industrial wastes (e.g. exploration & production waste, coal ash) and
• other wastes typically managed by the solid waste industry or generated by the public not included in the above items (e.g. electronic waste, disaster debris, etc).
• NOTE: Agricultural wastes (that aren’t handled by the waste industry), nuclear waste, and land applied wastewater treatment sludge are generally not included in this definition.

Pre-Proposal Process for Proposal Submission
All pre-proposals shall be submitted through an online application found https://erefdn.infoready4.com/. Mailed hard copies and email submissions will not be accepted. NOTE: You are being directed to a 3rd party platform called InfoReady. If you have not submitted through InfoReady before, you will need to create an account separate from the EREF website.
Pre-proposals are now REQUIRED prior to submitting a full proposal using the pre-proposal template. All pre-proposals must adhere to the criteria noted and be submitted by the established deadlines.  Pre-proposals submitted in response to this RFP that do not fit within the topic areas noted will not be reviewed.

Research Topic Areas
Pre-proposal topics must relate to sustainable solid waste management practices and pertain to the following topic areas:

• Waste minimization
• Recycling
• Waste conversion to energy, biofuels, chemicals or other useful products.  This includes, but is not limited to, the following technologies:
• Waste-to-energy
• Anaerobic digestion
• Composting
• Other thermal or biological conversion technologies
• Strategies to promote diversion to higher and better uses (e.g. organics diversion, market analysis, optimized material management, logistics, etc.)
• Landfilling

Desirable aspects of the above topics, in addition to or as part of hypothesis driven applied research, also include: economic or cost/benefit analyses, feasibility studies for untested technologies or management strategies, life cycle analysis or inventory, and analyses of policies that relate to the above.