Forecasting Municipal Solid Waste Generation in Major European Cities

An understanding of the relationships between the quantity and quality of environmentally relevant outputs from human processes and regional characteristics is a prerequisite for planning and implementing ecologically sustainable strategies. Apart from process-related parameters, continuous and discontinuous socio-economic long-term trends often play a key role in the assessment of environmental impacts. This paper describes the development of a prognosis model for municipal solid waste (MSW) generation in European regions. The objective is to assess future municipal waste streams in major European cities. We therefore focussed on cities, which face significant social and economic changes, e.g. in central and east European (CEE) countries. The investigations covered waste-related data and a broad set of potential influencing parameters that contained commonly used social, economic and demographic indicators as well as previously proved waste generation factors. An extensive database was created with an annual time series up to 32 years from 55 European cities and 32 countries. The evaluation of this historic time series and the cross-sectional data by means of multivariate statistical methods has unveiled significant relationships between the status of regional development and municipal solid waste generation. We identified a core set of significant indicators, which can describe a long-term development path that predetermines the level of waste generation. These findings concerning this analogy have been integrated in an econometric model for European cities.