On 18 December 2017 ACR+ published a report, entitled Comparison of municipal waste management in EU cities, which is part of the ACR+ European Observatory on municipal waste performances and is a follow-up of a 2014 report presenting an EU-capitals benchmarking. It compares municipal waste management in cities and metropolitan areas, using data from 17 cities across Europe, including ACR+ members Liège, Odense, Barcelona, Pamplona, Rennes, Maastricht and Porto. To allow consistent comparisons, the collected data are presented in factsheets, one per each city.

Following an analysis of data based on 3 parameters (scope of the data, local context, and local waste strategy), the study concludes that the cities presenting high performances all rely on source separation and at least partly to financial incentives, while the cities with lower performances generally resort to co-mingled collection and have set little to no economic instruments.

The report also highlights the fact that consistent and meaningful comparisons can only be achieved if there is a proper understanding of the local context, the exact scope of data and the associated waste management practices, the total arising of the different fractions thanks to composition analyses, as well as the different steps from collection to the sorting of materials in homogeneous fractions, allowing the exclusion of sorting residues from recycled quantities.

The full report can be downloaded from the ACR+ Virtual Library

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