When many people work in organized institutions or enterprises, those institutions or enterprises become big meeting places that also have energy, water and resources necessities. One of these necessities is the correct management of the waste that is daily produced by these communities. Universities are a good example of institution where every day a great amount of people go to work or to study. But independently of their task, they use the different services at the University such as cafeterias, canteens, photocopy etc. and as a result of their activity a cleaning service is also needed. All these activities generate an environmental impact. Nowadays, many Universities have accepted the challenge to minimize this impact applying several measures. One of the impacts to be reduced is the waste generation. The first step to implement measures to implement a waste management plan at a University is to know the composition, the amount and the distribution of the waste generated in its facilities. As the waste composition and generation depend among other things on the climate, these variables 1 should be analyzed over one year. This research work estimates the waste generation and composition of a Spanish University, the Universitat Jaume I, during a school year.To achieve this challenge, all the waste streams generated at the University have been identified and quantified emphasizing on those which are not controlled. Furthermore, several statistical analyses have been carried out to know if the season of the year or the day of the week affect waste generation and composition. All this information will allow the University authorities to propose a set of minimization measures to enhance the current management.

There are several factors, such as physical, geographical, socio-cultural, economic and political factors, which have an influence in the selective collection of the municipal solid waste (MSW). To define a selective collection system of MSW the waste generation pattern of the town should be firstly determined. In this way, the before mentioned factors need to be analysed in depth. This paper tries to analyse specifically the economic income level in order to determine actions to improve the waste management plan of a town. This research work includes three stages. In the first stage, waste samples of the light-packaging containers were collected in two zones of the town with different economic characteristics. The samples were collected in different seasons during one year to detect possible variations in the composition of the waste. In the second stage, the samples were characterized at the laboratory to define the composition and quality of the waste. It was firstly separated into four fractions: metals, plastic, brik and inappropriate. The inappropriate fraction was in its turn separated into cardboard, rubber and leather, inert waste, organic matter, paper, hazardous waste, clothes and shoes, glass and others. The plastic fraction was also separated into five type of plastics and the metal fraction into three. Finally, in the third stage, the data have been analyzed and conclusions have been extracted. One of the main results is that the zone with a higher income collects selectively more quantity of paper and cardboard and lightpackaging with the same logistic and information conditions. Another conclusion was that the quality of the waste collected in these zones was similar. The methodology exposed in this work can be extrapolated to other towns with similar characteristics. Otherwise, it will be useful when implementing a system to collect the waste selectively and especially to develop actions to achieve a good participation of everybody in the waste collection system.

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Waste management plans pay attention to municipal solid waste (MSW) collection systems. It represents a significant portion of waste management as it involves a great economic cost and environmental impact. For these reasons, many researchers have studied the optimization of collection routes, analyzing factors that make them more efficient and sustainable, for example, the overall distance traveled and the time spent on the route. Collection times depend on factors such as the speed of the truck, time at traffic lights or time spent on loading and unloading the waste. The loading and unloading times play an important role in the measurement of the total time of the route. Moreover, there is scarce information in the literature about measuring the real-time spent on the trip. All those times are necessary to optimize the total route time. However, it is difficult to obtain this information directly as it depends on parameters such as the type of truck. The aim of this work is to propose a methodology to define all the times involved in the waste collection process. Once they are well defined, they have to be measured in some cases or calculated in others. This works also presents a case study to validate the proposed methodology with an extensive fieldwork to measure those times that can’t be calculated in the waste collection process. The work presents the results of a study of the time spent at a collection point in six MSW collection systems using different types of collection trucks and bin designs. We have determined how the characteristics of the system affect the time spent at a collection point. Additionally, the times for the six models have been established. Finally, we have determined the influence of the collection model in the duration of the activity. Under certain conditions, times can coincide even though the models are different.

According to EU regulations, member states shall take measures to encourage the recycling of biowaste in a way that fulfils a high level of environmental protection. In Spain, the separate collection of biowaste is only implemented in some regions. For this reason, a pilot scheme based on an information campaign and the location of a specific brown container for biowaste in specific zones of the city was carried out in Castelló de la Plana (Spain) over a period of six months. In this period, the collection and composition of the biowaste was monitored in depth with the goal of determining the evolution of the efficiency of the new collection system over time. In the zones, the quality rate in the biowaste container increased as the pilot study progressed, finally reaching 90%. The rate of biowaste separation also increased in the three zones over time, although in different ways, which means that there is greater collaboration on the part of citizens. On the other hand, an analysis of the rate of net biowaste daily collection from zones 2 and 3 has shown that their value increases as the rate of containerization of biowaste decreases. Therefore, to obtain better results it will be necessary to increase the containerization of biowaste, that is, to reduce the distance from the citizen to the container. It can thus be said that there is a positive evolution of the experience, which boosts confidence when it comes to implementing the system throughout the city.