Municipal solid waste as a resource: part 2 - case study in sustainable management

Waste is intricate to manage. With greater attention now being paid to the use of waste as a resource, there is an increasing need to develop sustainable and secure management options for the most complex material resource streams. In order to achieve this, it is necessary to look to those materials, which owing to their complex structure have not traditionally been recycled, and so remain in the residual waste stream. This paper presents a methodology that has been developed to enable local authorities, or their equivalents, to assess the environmental and economic feasibility of collecting complex material streams separately, in order to improve their management of municipal solid waste. The methodology utilises available data from a number of sources, to determine the feasibility of options available. It is applied to a case study in Surrey, UK, in relation to the management of absorbent hygiene products. Currently this waste is collected as part of the residual stream, and dealt with either through landfill or energy from waste. The result of applying the new methodology suggests that the optimum solution is the separate collection of absorbent hygiene products and subsequent sterilisation and recycling.