Are we sorting enough? How many recyclable materials end up in black bins unnecessarily? And most importantly, how much waste will the inhabitants and companies in the Czech Republic produce in the coming years? For the Ministry of the Environment, they created the TiramisO software, which, based on a mathematical model, predicts waste production for the next ten to fifteen years and offers various scenarios of expected development.

Data are crucial to get ready for the future, and waste management is no different. Forecasting of waste production in the Czech Republic has so far been fragmented: everyone had their own method, the sum of forecasts for individual municipalities or regions did not correspond to the predictions for the whole country. That is about to change. Experts from the Institute of Process Engineering have developed a unique tool on which the Ministry and municipalities will build their future plans. "We have come up with a certified waste forecasting methodology. And on its basis, they created software that estimates the future amount of municipal, but also construction or medical waste based on the results of the previous years," says Martin Pavlas, the head of the research team of the Institute of Process Engineering at Brno University of Technology.

Municipal waste, i.e. waste produced mainly by citizens, is also a subject of the second certified methodology, aimed at performing municipal waste analyses. The analyses are intended to tell how citizens sort and how much recyclable materials end up in black bins. "In layman's terms, we might say that we have created a manual that will be followed in a uniform manner in the analyses so that the results are comparable and, in particular, repeatable," adds Pavlas.

More uniform input data should then refine the forecasts of the mathematical model, which calculates how the amount of municipal waste will develop in the coming years. "The lowest territorial unit for which we can make a prediction are the so-called municipalities with extended powers. There are 206 of them in the Czech Republic, plus 14 regions and we also have forecasts for the whole Czech Republic. We have developed a mathematical model that can process a large amount of data for all these units and at the same time distinguish a wide range of different types of waste," says Pavlas, adding that when updating the data, the calculation of the new forecast takes hours to days. A regular user will not feel the complexity of the calculations, the software will display the calculated results from the database within seconds on the web.

The outputs of the forecasting model will be of interest not only to the Ministry, but also to municipalities or investors and companies engaged in waste disposal or recycling. In addition to forecasting, which is a purely statistical model determining trends based on the past data, the tool will also offer so-called scenarios. "Historical data do not reflect, for example, a change in legislation, support for waste sorting, or rising landfill fees. Statistics cannot take these things into account, and therefore an expert estimate comes into play, which the expert at the ministry enters into the system and we calculate it at the level of regions and two hundred microregions," explains Pavlas.

When science does not smell nice

The website and software are the result of a long and not always nice-smelling three-year work of process engineering experts. Part of their research was also a detailed analysis of mixed municipal waste. In other words, they examined the contents of a black garbage can. "The measurement consisted of manual sorting of samples with a volume of one cubic meter into approximately 40 waste groups studied. The research took place in various regions, including Brno, Prague and Vysočina," says Jiří Gregor of the Institute of Process Engineering, who coordinated the fieldwork throughout the Czech Republic, and adds: "Paradoxically, samples from locations, where citizens do not sort much, were easy to sort because their samples were full of plastic, cans, paper, glass or, for example, coffee capsules, which are relatively easy to analyze. More difficult were the samples taken from more dutiful citizens, where a bit of biowaste appeared in a combination of a mixture of all sorts," Gregor recalls.

The end of landfilling, planned in the Czech Republic for 2030, assumes that most of the waste will be used as a secondary raw material, or at least a source of energy. According to Pavlas, the Czech Republic has a space for improvement in both of these respects. "For residual, materially unusable waste, we lack sufficient processing capacities, such as the waste-utilizing energy facilities, which can convert otherwise unusable waste into energy, i.e. electricity or heat. The second major challenge is sorted waste, which we still fail to use sufficiently for the production of new materials. Specifically, the utilization rate in the area of plastics is relatively low and depends on the material composition of a particular product or packaging. Only 30 to 60 percent of the yellow container is used for material, of course, it all depends on the current market developments and demand for secondary raw materials," adds Pavlas.

The pressure on municipalities to sort more will grow in the coming years, along with the landfill fees. Collection of sorted waste is not cheap either. "I expect a significant increase in waste management costs, which will also put pressure on municipal budgets and, by extension, citizens," says Pavlas. Financial and other aspects related to the "waste revolution", as the transition of the Czech Republic from a linear to a circular economy can be called, will be addressed by experts in the CEVOOH (Centre for Waste and Circular Economy) project, where a consortium of eight top research organizations and universities will focus on this issue.

The TiramisO website can be found on tiramiso.mzp.cz