Modelling Opportunities of Waste Production Quantities and Future Generation Rates

abstract

en

The transition to more environmentally friendly energy and the circular economy entails interventions at all levels, from legislative to support campaigns or subsidy policies. Changes are already taking place in waste management, where the most significant trend is to maximize recycling and prevent waste from production. However, to set the milestones that the European Commission has attempted in the circular economy package to set sensibly, as much data on waste as possible must be known. This is mainly the amount of waste produced within municipalities for all types of waste. It is also crucial to know the composition of mixed municipal waste to understand what potential for sorting and further separation is still hidden or possible from the population behaviour perspective. In each state, some data are recorded as part of monitoring in state databases. However, they contain many errors, are not consistent and, most importantly, do not provide all the data. In addition, it is necessary to look for trends in the data to estimate the future production of individual components of waste and prepare the necessary processing infrastructure. The paper will discuss all the pitfalls related to the forecasting of waste production, the relationships and correlations between individual waste codes, the links between regions and methods of detecting extreme values. Operational research, statistical procedures, clustering and other methods will be used to gain insight into the details of waste management. All the mentioned procedures will enable better decision-making in the field of legislation, building the necessary infrastructure, both for the treatment and final treatment of waste. With regard to the composition of the waste, it is also possible to introduce new waste streams within separate collection containers. All this will also lead to the possibility of better evaluating and directing waste management towards meeting the European Union's recycling targets.

The transition to more environmentally friendly energy and the circular economy entails interventions at all levels, from legislative to support campaigns or subsidy policies. Changes are already taking place in waste management, where the most significant trend is to maximize recycling and prevent waste from production. However, to set the milestones that the European Commission has attempted in the circular economy package to set sensibly, as much data on waste as possible must be known. This is mainly the amount of waste produced within municipalities for all types of waste. It is also crucial to know the composition of mixed municipal waste to understand what potential for sorting and further separation is still hidden or possible from the population behaviour perspective. In each state, some data are recorded as part of monitoring in state databases. However, they contain many errors, are not consistent and, most importantly, do not provide all the data. In addition, it is necessary to look for trends in the data to estimate the future production of individual components of waste and prepare the necessary processing infrastructure. The paper will discuss all the pitfalls related to the forecasting of waste production, the relationships and correlations between individual waste codes, the links between regions and methods of detecting extreme values. Operational research, statistical procedures, clustering and other methods will be used to gain insight into the details of waste management. All the mentioned procedures will enable better decision-making in the field of legislation, building the necessary infrastructure, both for the treatment and final treatment of waste. With regard to the composition of the waste, it is also possible to introduce new waste streams within separate collection containers. All this will also lead to the possibility of better evaluating and directing waste management towards meeting the European Union's recycling targets.

Waste Production; Forecasting; Prognosis; Waste Composition; Waste Modelling

30.08.2021

2653-8911

8

1

91–91

1