Economic assessment of municipal solid waste management in midsized metropolitan areas of Brazil

Abstract

This paper addresses the incipient number of studies regarding municipal solid waste management in Brazil, where the federal law requires the inclusion of waste pickers in waste management and proposes waste diversion targets far from being attained. Therefore, decision-makers can make the best choice economically among alternative technological roadmaps that meet the legal requirements. The proposed alternatives combine biowaste treatments (open composting, closed composting, anaerobic digestion), recycling and final disposal methods (landfill and incineration) for a metropolitan region with two million inhabitants. The results show that incineration can lower the costs for the citizens, and the cost increase is modest if anaerobic digestion is chosen if no profit is intended after 20 years (IRR=0%). However, higher profit (8% and 16% IRR) causes a significant increase in the service fees, which could encourage the use of composting facilities with lower environmental performance. Furthermore, the high waste diversions scenarios have lower service fees than the low diversions counterparts because of the increase in revenue from sales of recyclable materials and employing 5,697 instead of 2,138 pickers to work at sorting facilities, therefore highly recommended.