Abstract
Waste management represents a challenge for public authorities due to many reasons such as increased waste generation following urban population growth, economic burdens imposed on the municipal budget, and nuisances inevitably caused to the environment and local inhabitants. To optimize the system from a sustainability perspective, moving the transition towards a more circular economy, a better understanding of the different stages of waste management is necessary. A review of recently developed sustainability frameworks for waste management showed that no single framework captures all the instruments needed to ultimately provide a solid basis for comprehensive analyses of the potential burdens associated with urban waste management. Bearing this limitation in mind, the objective of this research is to propose a conceptual and comprehensive sustainability framework to support decision-making in waste management of European cities. The framework comprises a combination of methods capable of identifying future strategies and scenarios, to assess different types of impacts based on a life cycle perspective, and considers the value of waste streams, the actors involved, and possible constraints of implementing scenarios. The social, economic, environmental, technical and political domains are covered, and special attention is paid to impacts affecting foremost the local population.
Highlights
The linear economy is a wasteful system: many valuable materials are “lost” to landfills, and the products that are manufactured are consistently under-utilized
As yet there is no consensus on how to holistically assess the sustainability of urban waste/resource management, the main objective of this paper is to develop and propose a comprehensive, overarching sustainability framework to support decision-making in this area, which covers social, economic, environmental, technical and political pillars, considers local to global scale impacts, recognizes the importance of burden-shifting between processes and locations, allows a comparative analysis among cities, acknowledges the importance of stakeholder involvement, considers temporal changes, identifies potential synergies among sectors, recognizes value differences between waste types, accounts for possible constraints towards implementing new strategies and provides a basis for policy making
Out of the 22 articles which proposed frameworks or models that analyze the sustainability of waste management (Table 1), only five of them developed the methodology for urban systems or can be applied to case studies dealing with waste generation from a city or municipality
Summary
The linear economy is a wasteful system: many valuable materials are “lost” to landfills, and the products that are manufactured are consistently under-utilized This is amplified in the urban context where many studies have highlighted a structural problem with waste generation and management in key sectors such as mobility, food, and the built environment (e.g., [1,2]). Moving towards a circular economy in cities requires an involvement of many sectors and stakeholders Such a multi-disciplinary and multi-facets process inherently needs evidence-based and scientific sound information on the potential consequences of the decisions made. On this basis, establishing an overarching sustainability framework is crucial to support such a cohesive model for change. The authors identified and described the recent framework developments in the field of (urban) waste management, analyzed their comprehensiveness and proposed advancements
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