Abstract
Educational institutions and, specifically, university campuses are large energy consumers and waste producers. The impact of university campuses on the local waste management increases with decreasing the size of the city/town where universities are located. Following the growing interest of the scientific community on the research for strategies to improve the environmental sustainability of educational institutions, this paper aims at proposing specific parameters to 1) measure the performance of university buildings in waste management, 2) detect anomalous situations that require improvements and 3) implement ameliorative actions. Specifically, parameters like the per-capita or surface-specific waste generation could help identifying the structures that may require primary interventions. With reference to the case of a medium-size university, the paper points out the advantages of the punctual tariff system for waste management adopted by the local utility company and critically analyses its weak points. Overall, this system offers great opportunities for improving waste management and for cost savings, but requires careful management policies by public institutions.
Highlights
The importance of educational institutions as deliverers of “green” virtuous behaviours is demonstrated by the recent growing interest in university campuses and in their research for sustainable strategies in terms of energy efficiency [1,2], mobility [3,4,5], waste management [6,7,8,9] and, in general, carbon footprint [10,11]
The principles of Circular Economy (CE) have been set in 2015 by the European Union starting from the sector of MSW [17]
Schools and universities play a fundamental role in this sense, since the generation of residual Municipal Solid Waste (RMSW) by school/university buildings may be considerable higher than the household generation of MSW, especially in small-size urban areas [18]
Summary
The importance of educational institutions as deliverers of “green” virtuous behaviours is demonstrated by the recent growing interest in university campuses and in their research for sustainable strategies in terms of energy efficiency [1,2], mobility [3,4,5], waste management [6,7,8,9] and, in general, carbon footprint [10,11]. In addition to being large consumers of energy [19], complex educational buildings host different types of activities (classes, catering, office work, laboratory activities, public events) that generate recyclable and non-recyclable waste streams
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