Waste is a complex societal problem and its management brings together various stakeholders. However, lack of sufficient information on the quantities and types of materials in the waste stream can make sustainable waste management difficult. Since waste in one sector can be valuable as a resource in another, there is a need to understand the distribution of materials within the resource stream, especially those that go to landfill. Current work is seeking to address this: whereas much material is already recycled, this is not the only management option and there remain several problematic materials and components that need to be removed from residual waste. This paper, the first of two case studies, presents a more comprehensive waste composition specification to improve the management of municipal waste. In developing the approach, waste composition specifications currently in use were reviewed and compared with the solid municipal waste collected at community recycling centres and from kerbsides.Key primary and secondary descriptors for the better management of resources arising from municipal waste were determined and the impact of these changes on the information arising from composition analysis is discussed.
Waste is intricate to manage. With greater attention now being paid to the use of waste as a resource, there is an increasing need to develop sustainable and secure management options for the most complex material resource streams. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to look to those materials, which owing to their complex structure have not traditionally been recycled, and so remain in the residual waste stream. This paper presents a methodology that has been developed to enable local authorities, or their equivalents, to assess the environmental and economic feasibility of collecting complex material streams separately, in order to improve their management of municipal solid waste. The methodology utilises available data from a number of sources, to determine the feasibility of options available. It is applied to a case study in Surrey, UK, in relation to the management of absorbent hygiene products. Currently this waste is collected as part of the residual stream, and dealt with either through landfill or energy from waste. The result of applying the new methodology suggests that the optimum solution is the separate collection of absorbent hygiene products and subsequent sterilisation and recycling.
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