Circular economy in waste management – Socio-economic effect of changes in waste management system structure

Abstract

Due to the fast development, the EU economy has grown over its own raw material production. To enable future economic development, the EU is trying to develop a sustainable and resource-efficient economy. This path is emphasized through the idea of „Closing the Loop“ which is integrated into EU legislation by a Circular Economy Package and emphasizes avoidance of waste production and its recovery. New waste management goals require significant changes in the waste management system structure which introduces new problems and one of them is an increase in the costs for the system users (citizens). To assess the impact of these changes, the time-dependent Life Cycle Assessment based waste, material, and energy flow tracking framework is adapted and used to calculate material and energy production which can be monetised. As waste management plants/facilities are built with public money, to provide public service, in economic calculations annual cash flow of the system is equalized with zero, taking into account all incomes (incomes from products like energy vectors, secondary materials, and compost) and expenses (like an investment and operating costs). From these calculations, variable (volatile, time-dependent) and average system gate fee (operating cost per tonne of input waste), which is charged to the system users, are calculated. A possible increase in system cost can cause the issue of social unacceptance, which decision-makers, elected by the citizens, want to avoid. Results show that energy recovery of waste generates higher income then material recovery while overall lower system costs, and lower sensitivity of the system cost, is observed in the material recovery based scenarios. The lowest system costs are calculated for the scenario which combines material and energy recovery and avoids investments in final disposal/recovery facilities by outsourcing this service. The main problem with outsourcing the final disposal/recovery stage is the uncertainty of the cost of such service. It is found that this kind of approach has not been previously used for the assessment of the socioeconomic sustainability of the whole waste management systems and represents a good tool for decision-makers.