Nearly 9% of the waste generated in the EU comes from households, which means an average of 475kg per person every year. Overall, 26% of municipal waste is still sent to landfill, 27% incinerated and only 47% of municipal waste in EU is composted or recycled. This means that 80 million tons of recyclable materials are thrown away or ‘wasted’ annually. Among recyclables, biowaste (and especially food waste) is the most sensitive fraction as its management (as resource for material or energy recovery) is a key point into a good waste management system. Moreover, about 75% of food waste may be avoidable so efforts on prevention should be intensified. Waste management represents a cost of billions of Euros in our public budgets and in environmental terms means over 3% of total GHG emissions in Europe (over 100 million tons of GHG).
The challenge is to improve the waste management not only in economic or operational terms but also considering the environmental and social impacts.
To this end WASTE4THINK sets out to move forward the current waste management practise into a circular economy motto. To make so, we have integrated and validated 20 eco-innovative solutions that cover all the value chain from innovative social actions to prevent waste generation, to ICT tools and economic instruments to enhance collection and recycling and two new processes for the recovery of high-grade valuable materials from waste. The benefits of these solutions have been enhanced by a holistic waste data management methodology based on ICT tools built over the components of the FIWARE community. These tools have been demonstrated in 4 complementary urban areas in Europe: Zamudio (ES), Seveso (IT), Halandri (GR) and Cascais (PT).
The most relevant impacts obtained are: a 15% increase in waste sorting, 11% saving of management costs, 47% reduction of GHG emissions and more than 120.000 interactions with citizens.
These results come mainly from the introduction of food waste separate collection, improvement of the waste collection scheme and deployment of PAYT strategies, with the accompaniment of an intensive social action plan. All together has led to an increase of resources recovered (so, relevant impact savings such as in GWP) and waste diverted from landfill (again, with a relevant reduction of biowaste sent to these facilities and the consequent GHG emissions).
