Cost Assessment of Optimised Schemes

One of the major waste management concerns across Europe is the lack of cost-competitiveness of source separation systems which aim to reach high recycling rates, as compared with the traditional mixed MSW collection. Operators, in general, think that sorting food waste leads to higher costs of the overall collection scheme. 

Cost analyses carried out to date across Europe have traditionally focused on costs per kilogram (or per tonne) for the collection of a single waste material. However, there is evidence that this biases the picture, because the more waste collected, the lower the costs of the collection service per kilogram. This distortion obscures some important outcomes of integrated source separation and waste management  

Furthermore, evaluation of the cost for a single waste flow, does not allow one to compare its cost to the likely advantages of collection costs for other materials, flowing from operational integration . In effect, the collection of food waste, above all when it shows high capture, allows important changes in the collection scheme, by reducing, for instance, collection frequency for RW. 

It is therefore incorrect to express the cost of the service per kilogram collected, rather it should be expressed as cost per person. Once an overall cost of a certain scheme is given, the municipality could only be happy with lower deliveries which would, on the contrary, make the cost per kilogram higher This is why we shall focus on cost per person. 

Cost of collection (green bars) and cost of treatment/disposal (blue bars) 

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