Current municipal waste generation vs. three future scenarios

The chart compares the current residual and total municipal waste generation against 3 possible scenarios: 1) Business as usual (with a 3.7 % increase in total municipal waste) while meeting the 60 % recycling target; 2) A solution scenario, with a 3.7 % increase in total municipal waste that would be offset by 73 % recycling rate; 3) A solution scenario in which the 60 % recycling target would be met, and 34 % of total waste would be prevented

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Methodology

The current situation was taken from Eurostat data on total and residual municipal waste (the later as a sum of incinerated and landfilled municipal waste). For the two first scenarios, an increase of 3.7 % (as projected in the European Commission report) of total municipal waste was foreseen. To calculate the residual waste, in the first scenario, the 60 % recycling rate was used, which resulted in having the residual waste as [total MSW * (1-0.02-0.6)]. For the second scenario, it was calculated what would be the required recycling rate to reach the residual waste target. Lastly, for the third scenario, it was assumed that the the 60 % recycling target would be met, together with the halving target, so the necessary total amount of municipal waste was calculated under those two conditions.

Units

Million tonnes

Additional information

There is no downloadable dataset for the "Scoping study to assess the feasibility of further EU measures on waste prevention: final report" (European Commission, Directorate-General for Environment, Karigl, B., Neubauer, C., Kral, U., et al., Scoping study to assess the feasibility of further EU measures on waste prevention : final report, 2022, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2779/21588). The European Commission report contains two different projections until 2035, and the current figure is based on the same annual increase for the upper-bound projection until 2030 as in the Commission report.

Current municipal waste generation vs. three future scenarios

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References and footnotes