Solid Waste and the Circular Economy: A Global Analysis of Waste Treatment and Waste Footprints

Abstract

Detailed and comprehensive accounts of waste generation and treatment form the quantitative basis of designing and assessing policy instruments for a circular economy (CE). We present a harmonized multiregional solid waste account, covering 48 world regions, 11 types of solid waste, and 12 waste treatment processes for the year 2007. The account is part of the physical layer of EXIOBASE v2, a multiregional supply and use table. EXIOBASE v2 was used to build a waste-input-output model of the world economy to quantify the solid waste footprint of national consumption. The global amount of recorded solid waste generated in 2007 was approximately 3.2 Gt (gigatonnes 1 ), of which 1 Gt was recycled or reused, 0.7 Gt was incinerated, gasified, composted, or used as aggregates, and 1.5 Gt was landfilled. Patterns of waste generation differ across countries, but a significant potential for closing material cycles exists in both high-and low-income countries. The European Union (EU), for example, needs to increase recycling by approximately 100 megatonnes per year (Mt/yr) and reduce landfilling by approximately 35 Mt/yr by 2030 to meet the targets set by the Action Plan for the Circular Economy. Solid waste footprints are strongly coupled with affluence, with income elasticities of around 1.3 for recycled waste, 2.2 for recovery waste, and 1.5 for landfilled waste, respectively. The EXIOBASE v2 solid waste account is based on statistics of recorded waste flows and therefore likely to underestimate actual waste flows. Keywords:circular economy consumption-based accounting industrial ecology multiregional input-output municipal solid waste waste input-output Supporting information is linked to this article on the JIE website Conflict of interest statement: The authors have no conflict to declare.

Assessing circularity interventions: a review of EEIOA-based studies

“…Underestimating waste generation may be caused by three aspects (Tisserant et al 2017). First, some waste treatment sectors might not be included in the EEIOA model.…”

“…However, WIOA is constrained by the monetary flows in EEIOA (Nakamura and Kondo 2009), which can be considered a major limitation for the analysis of circular strategies, especially in the case of residual waste management, due to the lack of valuing waste. This challenge can be avoided by future applications of physical and hybrid tables that can be used to analyse the potential impacts of material efficiency and secondary flows more accurately (Tisserant et al 2017).…”

“…Such models usually are comprised of hybrid units in which secondary and waste flows can be considered (for example, Nakamura and Kondo 2009;Lenzen and Reynolds 2014). In addition, identifying these flows at multiregional scale has led to a better understanding of the impacts of international trade on resource and waste footprints in specific countries (as in Duchin and Levine 2013;Wiedmann et al 2015;Fry et al 2016;Tukker et al 2016;Tisserant et al 2017).…”

“…Similarly, Tisserant et al (2017) developed a harmonised multiregional solid waste account using coefficients from physical and monetary values from EXIOBASE v2.2.0 Physical 5 Hybrid 49 Time dimension…”

Industrial Sustainability and the Circular Economy as Counterparts to the Self-Referral Structure of Natural Law: Part II – A Global Case Study

“…One of the cornerstones of CE theory is its attempt to reduce or eliminate industrial and urban waste, a comprehensive analysis of which has been provided by Tisserant et al (2017) for solid waste streams such as ash and clinker, construction debris, metals, glass and plastics. In the context of urban biocycles, the Ellen MacArthur Foundation (2017) has, for example, pointed out that 13 billion tonnes of biomass flow annually through urban economies as food, energy and materials, and there is, as a consequence, significant opportunity to reduce waste volumes and capture value from the organic flows of urban environments.…”